The Temperamental Nude: Class, Medicine and Representation in Eighteenth-Century France (review)

In eight abundantly illustrated chapters, Tony Halliday endeavours to revisit and revise the lines along which to read the medical and sociopolitical discourse as well as the motif of the male nude in eighteenth-century French art. Halliday postulates an intricate interdependence between temperament theory, which enjoyed both revival and advancement thanks to the period's physiologists, the political reconceptualization of society, and the way in which these discourses affected the artistic depiction of the human body. He provides substantial visual evidence to support his contention, ranging from illustrations of natural history, such as Thomas Bewick's wood engravings in A History of British Birds, to statues of the male nude, Martin Desjardins's bronzes portraying national characters and temperament, as well as a selection of Jacques-Louis David's historiographical paintings. Halliday develops his line of argument on medical, artistic, and sociopolitical discourse and practice chronologically. He initially establishes how sociopolitical notions of class were reflected in the visual arts and takes Bewick's illustrations as a case in point: by putting natural history writing to moralistic uses à la Buffon, Bewick foisted 'human stereotypes of genteel and uncouth behaviour' (p. 14) on to the rendition of the woodpecker and wood pigeon. Halliday then traces, convincingly, the contrasting physiological models prevalent among the solidist, animist, and humourist approaches, recapitulating Galen's traditional quadripartite humoral theory, and subsequently focusing on Albrecht von Haller's revival and refashioning of the concept by adding the 'muscular temperament' (Chapter 3). In passing, he also refers to the correspondence, as assumed by Diderot, between a person's experience and their appearance (Chapter 2), and to the interconnectedness of temperament theory and Johann Kaspar Lavater's physiognomic works. Establishing that the developments in temperament theory are reflected in the representation of the human body in the art of the period — as, for example, in the depictions of the Calas affair — is central to Halliday's approach; in so doing he re-emphasizes the potential inherent in interdisciplinary approaches, even if, by now, some might think that the promises of the latter have worn thin. The boldest part of Halliday's argument is the suggestion 'that debates which appear to have been about class actually were about class, and not, for example, gender' (p. 1, emphasis original). This comes to the fore particularly in the second half of the study. The conflict between idealization and particularism, or the inquiry into how the portrayal of a specific individual could represent a more general identity (Chapter 5), is thus channelled into an issue at the centre of both Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary communication: the question of how the French nation should be represented, and what, if anything, it should be made to wear. Previously, the claim that Halliday intended to substitute 'gender' with 'class' in the historiographical discourse of eighteenth-century France has been central to the criticism of his argument. If, however, one reads Halliday's argument as a recommendation to reconsider accepted interpretations and readings, this study will be seen to offer the valid and, indeed, much needed change of perspective that the author promised in his Introduction.