This book expands the art historical perspective on art’s connection to anatomy and medicine, bringing together in one text several case studies from various methodological perspectives. The contributors focus on the common visual and bodily nature of (figural) art, anatomy, and medicine around the central concept of modeling (posing, exemplifying and fabricating). Topics covered include the role of anatomical study in artistic training, the importance of art and visual literacy in anatomical/medical training and in the dissemination (via models) of medical knowledge/information, and artistic representations of the medical body in the contexts of public health and propaganda.
The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences offers a uniquely comprehensive and global overview of the evolution of ideas, concepts and policies within the human sciences. Drawn from histories of the social and psychological sciences, anthropology, the history and philosophy of science, and the history of ideas, this collection analyses the health and welfare of populations, evidence of the changing nature of our local communities, cities, societies or global movements, and studies the way our humanness or ‘human nature’ undergoes shifts because of broader technological shifts or patterns of living. This Handbook serves as an authoritative reference to a vast source of representative scholarly work in interdisciplinary fields, a means of understanding patterns of social change and the conduct of institutions, as well as the histories of these ‘ways of knowing’ probe the contexts, circumstances and conditions which underpin continuity and change in the way we count, analyse and understand ourselves in our different social worlds. It reflects a critical scholarly interest in both traditional and emerging concerns on the relations between the biological and social sciences, and between these and changes and continuities in societies and conducts, as 21st century research moves into new intellectual and geographic territories, more diverse fields and global problematics.
The rise of Enlightenment philosophical and scientific thought during the long eighteenth century in Europe and North America (c. 1688-1815) sparked artistic and political revolutions, reframed social, gender, and race relations, reshaped attitudes toward children and animals, and reconceptualized womanhood, marriage, and family life. The meaning of “education” at this time was wide-ranging and access to it was divided along lines of gender, class, and race. Learning happened in diverse environments under the tutelage of various teachers, ranging from bourgeois mothers at home, to Spanish clergy, to nature itself. The contributors to this cross-disciplinary volume weave together methods in art history, gender studies, and literary analysis to reexamine “education” in different contexts during the Enlightenment era. They explore the implications of redesigned curricula, educational categorizations and spaces, pedagogical aids and games, the role of religion, and new prospects for visual artists, parents, children, and society at large. Collectively, the authors demonstrate how new learning opportunities transformed familial structures and the socio-political conditions of urban centers in France, Britain, the United States, and Spain. Expanded approaches to education also established new artistic practices and redefined women’s roles in the arts. This volume offers groundbreaking perspectives on education that will appeal to beginning and seasoned humanities scholars alike.
This is a study of the relation between the fine arts and philosophy in France, from the aftermath of the 1789 revolution to the end of the nineteenth century, when a philosophy of being called “Monism” emerged and became increasingly popular among intellectuals, artists and scientists. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer traces the evolution and impact of this monist thought and its various permutations as a transformative force on certain aspects of French art and culture – from Romanticism to Impressionism – and as a theoretical backdrop that paved the way to as yet unexplored aspects of a modernist aesthetic. Chapters concentrate on three major artists, Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Claude Monet (1840–1926), and their particular approach to and interpretation of this unitarian concept. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, philosophy and cultural history.
In this book, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez delves into an extraordinary collection of pathological drawings, photographs, sculptures, and casts created by neurologists at Paris’s Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in the nineteenth century. Led by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) and known collectively as the Salpêtrière School, these savants-artistes produced works that demonstrated an engagement with contemporary artistic discourses and the history of art, even as the artists/clinicians professed their dedication to absolute objectivity. During his lifetime, Charcot became internationally famous for his studies of hysteria and hypnosis, establishing himself as a pioneer in modern neurology. However, this book brings to light the often-overlooked contributions of other clinicians, such as Dr. Paul Richer, who created “scientific artworks” that merged scientific objectivity with artistic intervention. Challenging conventional interpretations of visual media in medicine, Ruiz-Gómez analyzes how these images and objects documented symptoms and neuropathology while defying disciplinary categorization. Grounded in extensive archival research, Pathology and Visual Culture targets an international audience of historians and students of art, visual culture, medicine, and the medical humanities. It will also captivate neurologists and anyone interested in fin-de-siècle French history and culture.
Through case studies, this book investigates the pictorial imaging of epidemics globally, especially from the late eighteenth century through the 1920s when, amidst expanding Western industrialism, colonialism, and scientific research, the world endured a succession of pandemics in tandem with the rise of popular visual culture and new media. Images discussed range from the depiction of people and places to the invisible realms of pathogens and emotions, while topics include the messaging of disease prevention and containment in public health initiatives, the motivations of governments to ensure control, the criticism of authority in graphic satire, and the private experience of illness in the domestic realm. Essays explore biomedical conditions as well as the recurrent constructed social narratives of bias, blame, and othering regarding race, gender, and class that are frequently highlighted in visual representations. This volume offers a pictured genealogy of pandemic experience that has continuing resonance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, history of medicine, and medical humanities.
Based on two international conferences held at Cornell University and the Freie Universität of Berlin in 2010 and 2015, this volume is the first ever to explicitly address the destruction of plaster cast collections of ancient Mediterranean and Western sculpture. Focusing on Europe, the Americas, and Japan, art historians, archaeologists and a literary scholar discuss how different museum and academic traditions – national as well as disciplinary –, notions of value and authenticity, or colonialism impacted the fate of collections. The texts offer detailed documentation of degrees of destruction by spectacular acts of defacement, demolition, discarding, or neglect. They also shed light on the accompanying discourses regarding aesthetic ideals, political ideologies, educational and scholarly practices, or race. With destruction being understood as a critical part of reception, the histories of cast collections defy the traditional, homogenous narrative of rise and decline. Their diverse histories provide critical evidence for rethinking the use and display of plaster cast collections in the contemporary moment.
Many artists and scientists – including Buffon, Goethe, and Philipp Otto Runge – who observed the vividly coloured shadows that appear outdoors around dawn and dusk, or indoors when a candle burns under waning daylight, chose to describe their colours as ‘beautiful’. Paul Smith explains what makes these ephemeral effects worthy of such appreciation – or how depictions of coloured shadows have genuine aesthetic and epistemological significance. This multidisciplinary book synthesises methodologies drawn from art history (close pictorial analysis), psychology and neuroscience (theories of colour constancy), history of science (the changing paradigms used to explain coloured shadows), and philosophy (theories of perception and aesthetic value drawn from Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty). This title will be of interest to scholars in art history, art theory, and the history of science and technology.
This book reveals how, when, where, and why vitalism and its relationship to new scientific theories, philosophies and concepts of energy became seminal from the fin de siècle until the Second World War for such Modernists as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hugo Ball, Juliette Bisson, Eva Carrière, Salvador Dalì, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini and John Cage. For them, Vitalism entailed the conception of life as a constant process of metamorphosis impelled by the free flow of energies, imaginings, intuition and memories, unconstrained by mechanistic materialism and chronometric imperatives, to generate what the philosopher Henri Bergson aptly called Creative Evolution. Following the three main dimensions of Vitalist Modernism, the first part of this book reveals how biovitalism at the fin de siècle entailed the pursuit of corporeal regeneration through absorption in raw nature, wholesome environments, aquatic therapies, electromagnetism, heliotherapy, modern sports, particularly rugby, water sports, the Olympic Games and physical culture to energize the human body and vitalize its life force. This is illuminated by artists as geoculturally diverse as Gustave Caillebotte, Thomas Eakins, Munch and Albert Gleizes. The second part illuminates how simultaneously Vitalism became aligned with anthroposophy, esotericism, magnetism, occultism, parapsychology, spiritism, theosophy and what Bergson called "psychic states", alongside such new sciences as electromagnetism, radiology and the Fourth Dimension, as captured by such artists as Juliette Bisson, Giacomo Balla, Albert Besnard, Umberto Boccioni, Eva Carrière, John Gerrard Keulemans, László Moholy-Nagy, James Tissot, Albert von Schrenck Notzing and Picasso. During and after the devastation of the First World War, the third part explores how Vitalism, particularly Bergson’s theory of becoming, became associated with Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist and Surrealist notions of amorality, atemporality, dysfunctionality, entropy, irrationality, inversion, negation and the nonsensical captured by Hans Arp, Charlie Chaplin, Theo Van Doesburg, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin alongside Cage’s concept of Nothing. After investigating the widespread engagement with Bergson’s philosophies and Vitalism and art by Anarchists, Marxists and Communists during and after the First World War, it concludes with the official rejection of Bergson and any form of Vitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This book will be of vital interest to gallery, exhibition and museum curators and visitors, plus readers and scholars working in art history, art theory, cultural studies, modernist studies, occult studies, European art and literature, health, histories of science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport studies, heritage studies, museum studies and curatorship.
While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain trades. Blind in Early Modern Japan illustrates the breadth and depth of those occupations, the power and respect that accrued to the guild members, and the lasting legacy of the Tokugawa guilds into the current moment. The book illustrates why disability must be assessed within a particular society’s social, political, and medical context, and also the importance of bringing medical history into conversation with cultural history. A Euro-American-centric disability studies perspective that focuses on disability and oppression, the author contends, risks overlooking the unique situation in a non-Western society like Japan in which disability was constructed to enhance blind people’s power. He explores what it meant to be blind in Japan at that time, and what it says about current frameworks for understanding disability.
