Abstract

In a series of close interdisciplinary readings of aesthetic-philosophical texts, scientific writings, and works of art, my thesis addresses the question of the representation of the human body in 19th-century France as a discursive site where philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific concerns regarding beauty, truth, and meaning intersected and formed complex relationships. The epistemological problem of how the body could visually be represented in a truthful manner, as a form of writing that needed to be legible and meaningful, turned into a theory of representation that was itself predicated on a certain understanding of the body and its relationship to subjectivity, soul/spirit/mind, beauty, health, norms and types. The relationships between neo-classicist academic conservatism, progressive scientific positivism, and avant-garde art were not of the nature of a simple influence or opposition, but were marked by significant structural overlapping, conflation, and internal contradictions. ;The thesis is divided into four sections. Chapters 1 to 3 address the way neoclassicist and romantic aesthetics defined the media of sculpture and painting with reference to the truth of the idealized body. A transitional chapter 4 examines the aesthetics of Hippolyte Taine as an attempt to bridge idealist and positivist theories of the human body in art. The second part examines empirical scientific approaches to the study of the body that remained structurally indebted to aesthetic preconceptions and artistic techniques: anthropometry and sociology , anthropology , physiognomy , and chronophotography and animated anatomy . The concluding section discusses various modes of the deformation of the neoclassical ideal body in modernist aesthetics and artistic practices. Chapter 8 focuses on theories of the comic and caricature as a breakdown of the signifying relationship between body and soul in writings by Hegel, Baudelaire and Henri Bergson. Chapter 9 finally compares neoclassicist notions of a natural body language of gesture and pose to the gestural deformations in Degas' theatrical, absentminded, and self-absorbed bodies, as well as movement, color, surface-effects, fragmentation, and repetition in Rodin's sculpture