Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism

by Stephanie O'Rourke

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.

205 pages, Hardcover

Published November 4, 2021

Reviews

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was ultimately not convinced by O'Rourke's approach/argument, although I really enjoyed chapter 3, which focused on Girodet and electricity, the most. The examples did not always feel like they coalesced together, like they were showing evidence of the readings being applied to them. Some of the examples were more compelling than others. I personally found the reading of the guillotine as a framework rather than as solely an object/act in chapter 4 to be the least convincing, although O'Rourke's point on its temporality resonated with the rest of the book. It is an enjoyable text but one that spends more time giving historical background on the different scientific processes it discusses (mesmerism, physiognomy, electricity, the guillotine and the surrounding debate about sensation) that it does necessarily talk about art, which might be less appealing for some readers.