Title: Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism by Stephanie O'Rourke
Abstract: Reviewed by: Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism by Stephanie O'Rourke Rebecca Marks Stephanie O'Rourke, Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021). Pp. 205. $99.99 cloth. The turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a dramatic change in intellectual tides. Spurred on by the momentum of revolutionary Europe, the empirical certainties of the Enlightenment had given way to the sublime ambiguities of Romanticism: or so the well trodden arguments tell us. Stephanie O'Rourke's Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism is keen to disrupt this binary narrative. Her book reconfigures the question of how the ideologies of the "Enlightenment" and "Romanticism" might be defined and does so by embracing the nuances of the transition from one to another. The end of the eighteenth century, O'Rourke argues, is a period where the perimeters between art, artifice, theater, spectatorship, and the scientific method were thought of as permeable, penetrable, and porous: much like the human body itself. Hers is a work which examines how bodies—both anatomical bodies and bodies of knowledge—were circumscribed and scrutinized by an emerging philosophy of Romanticism. In doing so, O'Rourke calls contemporary eighteenth-century scholars not to fear the capital "R," and encourages us instead to rearticulate the boundaries of its definition in line with its increasingly interdisciplinary field. [End Page 505] Tapping into the histories of art, science, and philosophy, not only does Art, Science, and the Body fit within the remits of research on visual, scientific, and popular cultures in the eighteenth century (one might place O'Rourke's work alongside new publications by Cora Gilroy-Ware, Richard C. Sha, and Christian Huemer1), but it also intentionally explodes the very limits which such research draws between disciplines.2 Moreover, building on recent work by Matthew C. Hunter and Jon Klancherm,3 O'Rourke pays refreshing and much needed attention to lesser known Royal Academicians, and does well to situate them outside of Burlington House and instead as part of a wider European landscape. Art, Science, and the Body explores how three experimental methodologies (Mesmerism, physiognomy, and electricity) relate to the lives and works of Philippe de Loutherbourg, Henry Fuseli, and Anne-Louis Girodet. Looming large over these case studies is the shadow of the French Revolution: an event whose consequences are referred to throughout, but which are most substantially tackled in the introduction and conclusion. This narrative framing proves an elegant foil to the exacting visual analysis of the central chapters and helps to place O'Rourke's more specific examples within their historical parameters. The case-study chapters all center around a number of artistic set pieces. From each of these O'Rourke draws out themes relevant to the individual artists. The technical optics of Loutherbourg's landscape The Falls of the Rhine, for example, are read as emblematic of the illusion and theater involved in the practices of Mesmerism. Fuseli's Head of a Damned Soul comes to signify the impossibility of reconciling the science of physiognomy with his exaggerated manner. The precarious family in Girodet's Déluge is taken as a motif of the galvanic conductivity of the human body, a feature which extends outside of the painting and into the bodies of its shocked viewers. O'Rourke's final chapter, which ties together the tripartite threads of the previous sections, centers around the motif of the guillotine, exploring the ways in which the decapitation which it enacts might be read as symbolic of the divergence of empirical evidence (head) with lived experience (body). The first chapter reads the landscapes of Loutherbourg alongside his practice of Mesmerism, a form of alternative medical therapy created by Franz Anton Mesmer, based on the transmission of invisible particles across organic matter. O'Rourke searches for ways in which Loutherbourg's paintings might reflect this numinous force, both through their symbolism and painterly techniques, the latter of which she links to Loutherbourg's earlier career as a set designer. In this, O'Rourke draws creative and thought-provoking parallels between spiritual, scientific, and theatrical practices in the period, using Loutherbourg's dual status as artist and...
Publication Year: 2023
Publication Date: 2023-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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