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The naked areas an artist represents when painting a human body were traditionally not conceived of in terms of skin but of flesh. This chapter discusses notions of flesh and flesh tones in the European art literature from the Middle Ages (Theophilus Prespyter, Cennino Cennini, Jean Lebèque) to French seventeenth and early eighteenth-century art theory. A focus is on the association of flesh and colour in the writings of Roger de Piles and in the technique of colour printing as theorised in Jacob Le Blon's 1725 treatise Coloritto, or the Harmony of Colouring. The chapter demonstrates how skin slowly made its entry into art theory over the course of the eighteenth century and argues that skin and flesh came to be perceived differently over the course of the early modern period. Especially the microscope changed the ways in which the bodily mater was seen: organic substance was now described with textile metaphors as texture or tissue. In accordance with the new medical understanding of the dermis as a tissue built of interwoven layers, eighteenth-century art practice and discourse turned skin into a complex organ that was supposed to be rendered via an appropriately textured painterly brushwork.

This chapter focuses on a set of nudes and portraits by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It engages with the artist's ambivalent relationship with artistic anatomy and demonstrates the artist's increasing attention to the body's surface achieved through a reduction of modelling of the physical forms. Ingres changed the terms of the fabrication of flesh tones – carnations – and skin became deliberately non-physiological. Critics registered Ingres's peculiar handling of skin and flesh as one of the artist's idiosyncrasies and their writings manifest a gradual shift in the understanding of the body in paint. In Ingres‘ paintings themselves, the established association of flesh and paint was replaced by the alignment of the skin with the images‘ ground, be it canvas or paper in the case of drawings, and of the depicted skin with the polished painterly surface. The final section argues that the suppression of anatomical detail is pushed to the extreme in Ingres‘ portraits of women, resulting in a renunciation of physiognomic paradigms in which a person's exterior is meant to refer to internal qualities and character. Like in his Valpinçon Bather, the concealment of skin goes along with the closure of the interior space.

In the film laboratory, China Girl reference images used in maintaining ideal appearance are literally marginalized on the ends of the filmstrip. Translated into numeric values, the bodies of China Girl models are instrumentalized for quality control procedures, transformed into industrial material embedded in the photochemistry of film. For this to happen, the woman’s body is first dematerialized and then disappears, a process that correlates to the production of the film image. While the laboratory uses of the China Girl are assumed to be rational and objective, this chapter shows that they are often more ideological than they are taken to be. The chapter concludes with a survey of experimental films that foreground the China Girl, including films that reproduce the marginalization of the figure or, from a feminist perspective, critique the laboratory procedures that determine the terms of the China Girl’s liminal appearance.

The chapter introduces questions of skin and flesh tones via a discussion of Pedro Almódovar's 2011 film The Skin I live in. The film suggests a number of themes that are pertinent to this book: skin and identity; the relations between inside and outside; the nude and its colour; artificial skin and fantasies of the human creation of life; skin, touch and the haptic potential of vision; finally, the relationship between skin's role as a medium and the mediality of the image; issues of the colour of the nude and the longstanding association of skin, flesh and colour. The introduction also situates the book within the most relevant art historical studies on skin, flesh and the materiality of the image as well as within the scholarly field of the history of the body and of skin.