Fleshing out surfaces

<i>Fleshing out surfaces</i> is the first English-language book on skin and flesh tones in art. It considers flesh and skin in art theory image making and medical discourse in seventeenth to nineteenth-century France. Describing a gradual shift between the early modern and the modern period it argues that what artists made when imitating human nakedness was not always the same. Initially understood in terms of the body's substance of flesh tones and body colour it became increasingly a matter of skin skin colour and surfaces. Each chapter is dedicated to a different notion of skin and its colour from flesh tones via a membrane imbued with nervous energy to hermetic borderline. Looking in particular at works by Fragonard David Girodet Benoist and Ingres the focus is on portraits as facial skin is a special arena for testing painterly skills and a site where the body and the image become equally expressive.