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Haut wie weicher Marmor: Die Frauenporträts von Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Contribution and context: The essay is part of a collected volume on resemblance and disfigurement in (predominantly modern) portraiture which takes up Walter Benjamin’s notion of “distorted resemblance” and originated from a conference jointly organised by the research centre “Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits” at Free University and the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Fend’s contribution discusses the paradoxes in Ingres’ portraits of women which were inadvertently distorted due to the irreconcilable expectations of the bourgeois portrait on the one hand, and the female body on the other.

Research imperatives and process: The essay argues against a reductive reading of Ingres' abstracting outlines as a mere feature of modernism by looking at the consequences these abstractions had for the body. In juxtaposing Ingres’ portraits of women with a set of written sources previously not discussed in relation to the artist, it demonstrates that the aestheticizing view of the female body was not only a feature of artistic transformation but shared by artistic, anatomy and medical literature.

The essay analyses a set of portraits by Ingres, in conjunction with a number of art critical texts and treatises on artistic anatomy. According to historical discourses on the substance, form and demarcation of the female body, women were ascribed in representation, a strange materiality "as if" they were made of "soft marble". In the eyes of art critics such as Jules Castagnary women lacked what portraiture was all about: character. Subverting such blatant misogyny, the article engages with the ways in which women in Ingres’ portraits escaped the classifying regime of nineteenth-century physiognomy.