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

HALLIDAY, TONY. The Temperamental Nude: Class, Medicine, and Representation in Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010. ISBN 978-0-72940994 -0. Pp. 258. £55. This interdisciplinary study focuses on the history of the male nude as a fraught artistic realm, particularly during the successive stages of the French Revolution (1789–99). Though rooted in the visual arts, Halliday’s book draws equally on the disciplines of medicine and political science to shape an absorbing investigation of their influence on the evolution of ideas about human identity and appearance alongside the boundaries of history painting. Halliday treats afresh the resurgence of temperament theory in the late eighteenth century, bringing the latter to bear on his close readings of select paintings and sculptures in their sociopolitical environment. His analysis moves seamlessly between competing discourses, building upon this synergy to expose the way in which the male nude’s reception during the reactionary, post-revolutionary period in France reproduces the politics of art for art’s sake, and its cultural discontents. Chapter 1 leads off with the framing assessment of two images of birds, represented in terms of their work or lack thereof, highlighting the dual role played by core values and historical context in the way that one reacts to a work of art. Following the creative thread linking occupation with appearance along with character in eighteenth-century natural histories, chapter 2 considers the representation of the human body in relationship to labor. The focal point is Denis Diderot’s reaction to Edmé Bouchardon’s statue, Love making himself a bow from the club of Hercules (1750), shown to reveal the philosophe’s emblematic “preoccupation with the moral and the physical consequences of labor” (43). The history of art intersects with that of medicine in chapter 3, where Halliday exposes the tension between Diderot’s art criticism and his physiological views. Deference to the classical idea of the beautiful body, entailing belief in a universal human nature , overlaps with recourse to humoral theory inherited from Hippocrates and Galen. The latter incorporates the physiological basis, developed principally by eighteenth-century anatomist Albrecht von Haller, to determine variations in temperament. An underlying difference between the ancient and the modern account of human temperament takes on social significance in the world recast by the Revolution of 1789. A new, democratic sense of citizenship created a quandary in the artistic arena, as summed up in chapter 4, “How could the portrayal of a specific individual represent a more general identity?” (120). Examined in cultural context in chapter 5 is “the citizen body” and the artistic implications of this social construct, based on equality rather than “hierarchies of difference” (127), for representations of the nation. Illustrative of this dilemma, as Halliday demonstrates, is Jacques-Louis David’s Le serment du jeu de paume (1791). Through the history of its reception, alternately invoking the tradition of classical nudity and the meaning inscribed on modern dress, David’s painting poses as part of its object of inquiry whether art has a social purpose. Chapter 6 elaborates upon this question, teasing from another famous history painting by David an objective beyond the aesthetic function of the ideal: “But in his nakedness David’s Bara symbolized something more—a unity which glossed over the division at the heart of the French society, that between the propertied and those who lived by the fruits of their labor” (181). Reflective of this political discord, demonstrated in chapter 7, was the more refined model citizen forged by medical authority Pierre Cabanis and echoed in statuary art of the time, distinguishing the cerebral from the muscular 404 FRENCH REVIEW 86.2 temperament to make education central to the future republic. The aesthetic and social tensions mingling in David’s Les Sabines (1799), treated in chapter 8, bring to a splendid close this work’s display of Halliday’s erudition and keen sense of how to impart art’s provocative richness as a cultural archive. Colby College (ME) Adrianna M. Paliyenko MCKINNEY, MARK. The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84631-642-5. Pp. 270. £65. McKinney goes beyond the aesthetic merits of Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD...