Overview

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.

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9781009001267

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Reviews

'Stephanie O'Rourke's Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism is an exemplary book … Amply illustrated with numerous color images and framed by a substantial concluding chapter, the book presents a capstone vision of how histories of art and science can be told together.' Matthew Hunter, Nineteenth-Century Art World Wide 'O'Rourke forces us not only to think anew about familiar paintings, but to reflect on how we establish relationships between art and science in other cases … an approach that has the potential to reconceptualize not just the work of individual artists, but the entire Romantic era' Oliver Wunsch, Boston College, CAA Reviews '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

Author Information

Stephanie O'Rourke is a lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews.

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