Diderot, Hogarth, and the aesthetics of depilation

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 17-38

  Endres, Johannes ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG   (Germany)

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EID: 60950735466     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2004.0056     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. See, for example, Svetlana Balabanova, "... aber das Schönste an ihr war ihr Haar, es war rot wie Gold . . . ". Haare im Spiegel der Kultur und Wissenschaft, in collaboration with Peter Kaiser, with an introduction by Otto Braun-Falco (Ulm: Universitäts Verlag, 1993). I would like to thank Heiko Damm, Berlin, and Wolfram Pichler, Florence, for their knowledgeable suggestions
2. See Book of Judges 16, 15 et seq.
3. Monika Gsell, Die Bedeutung der Baubo. Kulturgeschichtlicbe Studien zur Repräsentation des weiblichen Genitales (Frankfurt a.M., Basel: Stroemfeld, 2001), 13
4. Berthold Hinz, Aphrodite. Geschichte einer abendländischen Passion (München: Hanser, 1998), 38 et seq
5. See also Ann-Sophie Lehmann, "Das unsichtbare Geschlecht. Zu einem abwesenden Teil des weiblichen Körpers in der bildenden Kunst," Körperteile. Eine kulturelle Anatomie, ed. Claudia Benthien, Christoph Wulf (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 316-39, in particular 319, as well as Gsell, Baubo, 9
6. Lehmann, "Das unsichtbare Geschlecht," 317
7. See Martin F. Kilmer, Greek Erotica on Attic Red-Figure Vases (London: Duckworth, 1993), 133-59
8. For similiar approaches see Gsell, Baubo
9. Lehmann, "Das unsichtbare Geschlecht"
10. Hinz, Aphrodite
11. and also Inge Stephan, "Das Haar der Frau. Motiv des Begehrens, Verschlingens und der Rettung," Körperteile, 27-48, in particular 41: "Even if one does not follow the psychoanalytical constructions between hair, femininity and castration, it is hard to ignore the multitude of pictures in art, literature and science that revolve around just this connection in a phantasmatic way." Stephan's essay, it should be noted, was the first to open up the topic for literary history
12. Lehmann, "Das unsichtbare Geschlecht," 321
13. See Helmut Pfotenhauer, "Gerneißelte Sinnlichkeit. Herders Anthroplogie des Plastischen und die Spannungen darin," in Pfotenhauer, Um 1800. Konfigurationen der Literatur, Kunstliteratur und Ästhetik, (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), 79-102, in particular 94-9
14. Winfried Menninghaus, Ekel. Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), 119
15. Denis Diderot, Salons, ed. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar, 4 vols., vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 210: "La seconde, c'est: Pourquoi la sculpture, tant ancienne que moderne, a dépouillé les femmes de ce voile que la pudeur de la nature et l'âge de puberté jettent sur les parties sexuelles, et l'a laissé aux hommes? Je vais tâcher d'entasser mes réponses, afin qu'elles se dérobent les unes par les autres. La propreté, l'indisposition périodique, la chaleur du climat, la commodité du plaisir, la curiosité libertine, et l'usage des courtisanes qui servoient de modèles dans Athènes et dans Rome; voilá les raisons qui se présenteront les premières à tout homme de sens, et je les crois bonnes. Il est simple de ne pas rendre ce que l'on ne trouve pas dans son modèle. Mais Part a peut-être des motifs plus recherchés; il vous fera remarquer la beauté de ce contour, le charme de ce serpentement, de cette longue, douce et légère sinuosite qui part de l'extrémité d'une des aines, et qui s'en va s'abaissant et se relevant alternativement, jusqu'à ce qu'elle ait atteint l'extrémité de l'autre aine; il vous dira que le chemin de cette ligne infiniment agréable seroit rompu dans son cours par une touffe interposée; que cette touffe isolée ne se lie à rien, et fait tache dans la femme; au lieu que dans l'homme, cette espèce de vêtement naturel, d'ombre assez épaisse aux mamelles, va s'éclaircissant, à la vérité, sur les flancs et sur les côtés du ventre; mais y subsiste, plus élevée, plus fournie, autour des parties naturelles. Il vous montrera ces parties naturelles de l'homme, dépouillees, comme un intestin grêle, un ver d'une forme déplaisante." (Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations from French and German texts are by the translator of this essay.)
16. Fend in particular emphasizes this ambivalence; see Mechthild Fend, Grenzen der Männlichkeit. Der Androgyn in der französischen Kunst und Kunsttbeorie 1750-1830 (Berlin: Reimer, 2003)
17. Friedrich Schiller, "Kallias oder Über die Schönheit. Briefe an Gottfried Körner," Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke, Herbert G. Göpfert, 5 vols. (München: Hanser, 1989), 5:394-433, here 424
18. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty. With the rejected passages from the manuscript drafts and autobiographical notes, ed. with an introduction by Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 27, 45
19. Hogarth, Analysis, 45 et seq
20. I cannot discuss at length the aspects of sensory physiology inherent to this idea, even if they are highly relevant and revealing for enlightenment discourses and the privileged position of the sense of seeing within them. Hogarth, for example, assumes that the eye in the process of looking sends out rays to the objects. These rays, similar to threads, remain connected to the eye, thus tracing the outlines of the objects viewed. If in doing so the natural rhythm of the eye movement gets irritated by unsightly objects, the beholder feels annoyed; see Analysis, 43
21. Note also the argumentation of Menninghaus, Ekel, 78 et seq., 118 et seq., who discusses the abject dimensions of skin and hair in eighteenth-century theories of art
22. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, Winckelmanns Werke. Einzig rechtmaßige Original-Ausgabe, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Hoffmann'sche Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1847), 1:1-516, here 229; see also 133: "The forms of a beautiful body are determined by the lines. . . ."
23. Winckelmann, "Von der Kunst der Zeichnung der alten Völker," Winckelmanns Werke, 1: 517-85, at 525
24. In his Geschicbte der Kunst des Alterthums Winckelmann deals with the issue of hair in his chapter on clothing (the "female dress"); see Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst, 230 et seq
25. See also Klaus Schneider, Natur-Körper-Kleider-Spiel: Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Studien zu Körper und Subjekt im späten 18. Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1994)
26. and in particular Ulrike Patz and Ulrike Müller-Hofstede, "Anziehende Natürlichkeit. Zur Grazienkonzeption bei J.J. Winckelmann," to be published in Johannes Endres, Barbara Wittmann, Gerhard Wolf, eds., Schleier. Material-Medium-Metapher (München: Fink, 2004)
27. Winckelmann, "Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauerkunst," Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften, Vorreden, Entwürfe, ed. Walther Rehm, with an introduction by Helmut Sichtermann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 27-59, at 42
28. Diderot, Salon de 1765, 210: ". . . qu'une étoffe épaisse et grossière dérobe le nu que la sculpture est plus jalouse encore de prononcer que la peinture... ." For the parallel between hair and fold
29. see also D. Johann Gottfried Kneiphof, Abhandlung von Haaren, deren Beschreibung, Nutzen, Zufällen und Mitteln dagegen (Rotenburg an der Fulda, 1777), in particular the "Publisher's Introduction."
30. On the other hand, when Diderot argues from the perspective of painting (as the art of color) instead of sculpture, the logic reverses: "Drawing renders to the objects shape, colour, life. Drawing is the divine breath that vivifies"; Diderot, "Essai sur la peinture," Œuvres de Denis Diderot, publiées, sur les manuscrits de l'auteur, par Jacques-André Naigeon, 15 vols. (Paris: Deterville), 13 (1798): 375-482, at 387
31. Therefore, the interpretation of Diderot's phrase in Pfotenhauer, "Gemeißelte Sinnlichkeit," 97 et seq., is questionable: it draws a clear dividing line between Diderot on the one hand and the classicist discourse in Germany (Herder, Winckelmann, Heinse, Goethe) on the other, claiming a sort of special status for the French philosopher. To me it seems much more promising to analyse the manifold overlappings in terms of the "naked body" between art theory in Germany, England, and France
32. Peter Bexte, "Die Schönheit der Analyse," epilogue in William Hogarth, Analyse der Schön-heit, trans. Jörg Heininger, with an epilogue by Peter Bexte (Dresden, Basel: Verlag der Kunst), 212-31, at 226
33. For a further reaching discussion of the topic's philosophical and arthistorical facets, see in particular Hubert Damisch, Traité du Trait. Tractatus tractus (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1995)
34. See also Diderot, "Essai sur la peinture," 459: "I cannot bear it when they show me the figure of muscles underneath the skin; yet they cannot show me the naked underneath the dress clearly enough."
35. According to the title of the first translation of the "Analysis" into German by Mylius in 1754 ("Die Zergliederung der Schönheit")
36. Diderot, "Essai sur la peinture," 385
37. "Tâchez, mes amis, de supposer toute la figure transparente, et de placer votre ceil au centre: de-là vous observerez tout le jeu extérieur de la machine; vous verrez comment certaines parties s'étendent, tandis que d'autres se raccourcissent; comment celles-là s'affaissent, tandis que celles-ci se gonflent; et, perpétuellement occupés d'un ensemble et d'un tout, vous réussirez à montrer dans la partie de l'objet que votre dessin présente, toute la correspondance convenable avec celle qu'on ne voit pas; et, ne m'offrant qu'une face, vous forcerez toutefois mon imagination à voir encore la face opposée; et c'est alors que je m'écrierai que vous êtes un dessinateur surprenant." Note also Goethe's comment in: Diderot, Ästhetische Schriften, 2 vols., (Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1967), 1: 714, as well as Lessing's vote regarding the art of poetry in his "Laokoon": "In the poet's work a dress is no dress; it hides nothing; our imagination sees through everything"
38. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert et al., 8 vols. (München: Hanser, 1979), 6: 50
39. Diderot, "Extrait d'un Ouvrage anglois sur la peinture," OEuvres, 15: 270-80, at 277 et seq
40. Diderot, "Extrait," 278 et seq.: "Nous autres peuples froids et dévots, nous sommes toujours enveloppés de draperies; et le peuple, qui ne voit jamais le nu, ne sait ce que c'est que beauté de nature, finesse de proportion. Praxitèle fit deux Vénus, l'une drapée, l'autre nue. Cos acheta la première, qui n'eut point de réputation; Gnide fut célèbre à jamais par la seconde. Notre Venus, si nous en avons une, est tout au plus la Vénus drapée de Praxitèle."
41. and Dr. Hans Radspieler, Neu-Ulm, 39 + 6 vols. (Hamburg: Greno Verlagsgesellschaft, 1984), 24: 172 et seq., n. 12.00 See also Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel "Venus im Pelz" of 1869-a pornographic fantasy that likewise features the difference between nakedness and clothing (fur!) as one between the true art of the ancients and its decline among the moderns
42. Diderot, Salon of 1765, 210: ". . . et qu'elle pense moins au moment présent qu'aux temps à venir. Les hommes n'ont pas toujours été vêtus; qui sait s'ils le seront toujours?"
43. Jean Starobinski, 1789. Les Emblèmes de la Raison (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 100
44. François Hemsterhuis, "Lettres sur la sculpture. À M. Théodore de Smeth," Œuvres philosophiques, par L.S.P. Meyboom, 3 vols. (Leuwarde: W. Eckhoff, 1846), 1:13-48, at 45: "La seconde est que la sculpture doit parler à la postérité la plus reculée, et, par conséquent, doit parler le langage de la nature . . . toute draperie ou tout vetêment qui appartient à quelque siècle ou à quelque nation en particulier, doivent être des sujets proscrits en sculpture."
45. Winckelmann, Geschicbte der Kunst, 515: "Ich bin bei der Geschichte der Kunst schon über ihre Gränzen gegangen, und ohngeachtet mir bei Betrachtung des Untergangs derselben fast zu Muthe gewesen ist, wie demjenigen, der bei Beschreibung der Geschichte seines Vaterlandes die Zerstörung desselben, die er selbst erlebt hat, berühren rnußte, so konnte ich mich dennoch nicht enthalten, dem Schicksal der Werke der Kunst, so weit mein Auge ging, nachzusehen, so wie eine Geliebte am Ufer des Meeres ihren abfahrenden Liebhaber, ohne Hoffnung ihn wieder zu sehen, mit bethränten Augen verfolgt, und in dem entfernten Segel das Bild des Geliebten zu sehen glaubt. Wir haben, wie die Geliebte, gleichsam nur einen Schattenriß von dem Vorbild unsrer Wünsche übrig; aber desto größere Sehnsucht nach dem Verlornen erweckt derselbe, und wir betrachten die Kopien der Urbilder mit größerer Aufmerksamkeit, als wir in dem völligen Besitz von diesen würden getan haben."
46. See Pliny, Natural History, with an English translation in ten volumes, by H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press and London: William Heinemann), 1938-63, book 35, 43, 151
47. See also Fend, Grenzen der Männlichkeit, 44 et seq.
48. and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, "Dibutadis. Die weibliche Kindheit der Zeichenkunst," Kritische Berichte 4 (1996): 7-20
49. Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997)
50. Barbara Maria Stafford, "Beauty of the Invisible. Winckelmann and the Aesthetics of Imperceptibility," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 43 (1980): 65-78, at 77: "like the contour-the silhouette conjures up the shadow of absence, of an invisible divinity."
51. Amobius, Adversus Nationes (about 400 AD), here quoted after Gsell, Baubo, 35; see also Georges Devereux's essential study, Baubo. La vulve mytbique (Paris: J.C. Godefroy, 1983)
52. For a contentious interpretation of this passage see Fritz Graf, Eleusis und die orphische Dichtung Athens in vorhellenistischer Zeit (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1974), 194 et seq. Graf points out that Baubo's naked pudendum might go back to the ancient practice of novatio, a partial cosmetic depilation of the pudendum popular especially among women
53. For this see the interesting annotations of the "Apophoreta" by Friedrich Carl Forberg (1824), a commentary on the "Hermaphroditus," a Quattrocento collection of erotic epigrams. They seem to sum up the eighteenth century's level of knowledge on depilation; see Antonio Panormita, Hermaphroditus, with a commentary by Wolfram Körner, Steffen Dietzsch, with Apophoreta by Friedrich Carl Forberg, reprint of the 1908 edition (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1986), 185-340, at 211 et seq. The early twentieth-century epilogue by Alfred Kind underlines again that even 250 years after Diderot the discussions on the topic in question still reproduces central arguments of the Enlightenment: "The ancient practice of depilation of the female pudendum even today continues to live on in the statues. The artists summon up aesthetical reasons for this custom; others speak of canon and tradition; others again insist that the representation of natural pubic hair looks obscene. However, Aristophanes' Lysistrata shows drastically enough that on the contrary among the ancient Greeks the shaved or depilated pudendum was perceived as obscene. The woman in antiquity had herself depilated as long as she wanted to appear desirable, which is why old or ugly women were being mocked at if they attached importance to this aspect of personal hygiene. As depilation occurs only sporadically in the history of mankind, there can be no fundamental obscene appeal inherent to it, rather it should be understood in terms of an erotic fashion"; Hermaphroditus, 420
54. See Hermaphroditus, 223 et seq
55. Apart from Diderot, see once more the epilogue in the "Hermaphroditus" of 1908
56. See the article "Menstruation" in Lexikon des Mittelalters, ed. Norbert Angermann, vol. 6 (Munich: Artemis-Verlag, 1993), 528 et seq. Pliny thinks of menstrual blood as of a harmful substance similar to a poison that can even spoil the harvest or turn a mirror blind if brought into contact with a menstruating woman. It should be noted that, on the other hand, the eighteenth century talks of the female mons veneris as of its "mirror"
57. Pliny, Natural History, book 7, 13, 63-6 and book 35, 23, 77-82; see also n. 74 of this essay
58. For further references see also Matthias Winner, "Gottlieb Schicks Eva und der edle Contour," Zeichnen. Malen. Bilden. Schwäbischer Klassizismus zwiscken Ideal und Wirklichkeit 1770-1830, ed. Christian von Hoist, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1993), 2:265-87, in particular 270
59. See Hogarth, Analysis, 39 (on the pyramid), as well as Bexte, "Die Schonheit der Analyse," 223 et seq
60. Important are here also the following remarks from Diderot's Salon de 1765, 170: "Mr. Loutherbourg, even if one has claimed that a composition needs to be structured in the shape of a pyramid in order to please the eye, this should not happen in such a way that two straight lines meet in one point, thus forming the tip of a triangle, equilateral or not, but rather in the form of a wavy line that runs along various objects and whose windings lead up to the tip of the highest object, brushing against it to then fall down again in different windings while touching the tip of yet other objects."
61. See Stephan, "Das Haar der Frau," 30 et seq
62. In his "Essai sur la peinture," 392, Diderot calls the "charming flush with which innocence, youth, health, modesty and shame adorn a girl's cheeks" not incidentally the "most beautiful colour in the world."
63. For a more detailed discussion of these contexts I refer to my upcoming publication, Literatur und Fetischismus. Das Bild des Schleiers zwischen Aufkläirung und Moderne (Habilitationsschrift Universität Leipzig). An analogous interpretation of hair and veil can already be found in the bible, 1. Corinthians, 11, 2-16: "The hair has been given to her [the woman] so to speak as a veil."
64. For this and for the following arguments, see the historical essay of Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen. Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765-1914 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2001). The hygiene movement thus also laid the foundations for natural medicine, homeopathy, and psychosomatics
65. See Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen, 45 et seq., as well as the following quote: "Central to the discourse on hygiene is the belief that the individual to a great extent is able to control health, disease or even the moment of death . . . "
66. Reizbare Maschinen, 19
67. Sarasin generally follows Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution. Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven, London: Yale Univ. Press, 1989)
68. See Anne L. Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes [New York 1978] (London: Univ. of California Press, 1993), in particular 138 et seq., 146 et seq.
69. see also Lynn Hunt, "Pornography and the French Revolution," The Invention of Pornography. Obscenity and the Origin of Modernity, 1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 301-39, 394-400
70. Albrecht Koschorke, "Die zwei Körper der Frau," Die nackte Wahrheit. Zur Pornographie und zur Rolle des Obszönen in der Gegenwart, ed. Barbara Vinken (München: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1997), 66-91
71. See Starobinski, 1789, 49-59 ("La cité géomé trique")
72. For the popularity of this argument, see also Winckelmann, Herder, and others, as well as Gabriele Brandstetter, "Spiel der Falten. Inszeniertes Plissee bei Mariano Fortuny und Issey Miyake," Mode, Weiblichkeit und Modernität, ed. Gertrud Lehnert (Dortmund: Ebersbach, 1998), 165-93
73. See e.g. Cicero, De oratore, III, XXXVIII, 155: "The third method in our list, the use of metaphor, is of wide application; it sprang from necessity due to the pressure of poverty and deficiency, but it has been subsequently made popular by its agreeable and entertaining quality. For just as clothes were first invented to protect us against cold and afterwards began to be used for the sake of adornment and dignity as well, so the metaphorical employment of words was begun because of poverty, but was brought into common use for the sake of entertainment." Herder also speaks of the fact that the invention of clothes among the moderns results from a "lack" of the "naked wealth of the ancients." In doing so he quotes the well-known theory of the origin of the metaphor according to which the inauthentic mode of speaking can be traced back to a "deficiency" of language
74. see Johann Gottfried Herder, "Plastik. Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume," Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Günter Arnold et al., (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker-Verlag, 1994), 4: 243-326, at 268
75. The differences of the ubiquitous metaphors of "network" and "texture" in postmodern and modern discourses are discussed in detail in Johannes Endres, Literatur und Fetischismus (forthcoming)
76. Different Christina Vogel, Diderot. L'esthétique des "Salons" (Bern, Berlin et al.: Peter Lang, 1993), 23 et seq. ("Les strategies de persuasion")
77. For a metaphorical identification of mirror and female-or androgynous-pudendum see Winckelmann, "Geschichte der Kunst," 135, and n. 48