Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism

Innovative, alternative account of romanticism, exploring how art and science together contested the evidentiary authority of the human body.

Stephanie O'Rourke (Author)

9781316519028, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 November 2021

205 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

'As her wide reading and close looking show, these artists' attempts to make the body legible hit at every juncture upon instability of the self, invisibility of the causes of action, and other sources of error and indeterminacy in scientific method and Enlightenment efforts to apply it to modern life. The results have not always been appreciated as art. To reveal them as vibrant applications of-and challenges to-the most iconoclastic science of their time is the task O'Rourke sets herself.' Andrei Pop, Review 19

Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This work reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists drew upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them.

1. De Loutherbourg's mesmeric effects
2. Fuseli's physiognomic impressions
3. Girodet's electric shocks
4. Self evidence on the scaffold.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900 [ACV], History of art & design styles: c 1600 to c 1800 [ACQ]