T. Halliday, The Temperamental nude: class, medicine and representation in eighteenth-century France
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TONY HALLIDAY
The Temperamental nude: class,medicine and representation in eighteenth-century France
SVEC2010:05
ISBN 978-0-7294-0994-0
xiv+258 pages, 47 ills, £55 / €70 / $100
Présentation de l'éditeur
Although discredited by seventeenth-century scientists, temperamenttheory – which attributed human moods to the interaction of four distinctbodily fluids or ‘humours' – was refashioned a century later to create a moral and physiological typology ofsocial classes.
In this richly-illustratedbook, Tony Halliday argues that matters of artistic representation were closelyconnected to medical and political discourses throughout the later eighteenthcentury, especially during the successive phases of the French Revolution. Heexplores the effects of the reworked theory of humours on visualrepresentation, focusing on:
- the interactionof art and politics in debates about the visual portrayal of the ‘new citizen'
- Antique notionsof an ideal body and their transformation in contemporary art
- the concept of anew ‘muscular' temperament, and its social, political and artistic implications
- the impact ofcertain works of art such as Bouchardon's statue of Cupid fashioning a bow from the club of Hercules and the uneasethey revealed in late eighteenth-century Europe about the relationship ofcharacter, appearance and occupation.
Collaborator biographies:
Tony Halliday (1946-2006) was a Lecturer in Art History at Newcastle University. He was the author of Facing the Public: portraiture in the aftermath of the French Revolution (Manchester, 1999), published on Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar, and more widely on French art of the revolutionary period.
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