Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Looking at Men considers how art, medicine, and sport in the 19th century overlapped to reinforce notions of masculinity. Through a shared violence of human dissection, pugilism, and war, men in artistic and medical professions secured their masculine status and professional authority. This volume scrutinizes the relationships between the heteronormative, the homosocial, and the homoerotic in art and depictions of anatomy. Close analysis of works by C zanne, Courbet, Degas, Delacroix, G ricault, Millet, Pissarro, and others offers fresh insight, reinforced by parallels illustrated in literary descriptions of bodies in Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes. Anthea Callen examines how ideas of healthy male "normality" and a modern virile masculinity were constructed and negotiated through these artistic and literary representations; she also measures these virile body images against actual, classed or racialized male bodies, delivering lively scholarship that spans art history, history of science, literature, and anthropology, as well as studies of masculinity and sexuality.
Synopsis
Beginning in 1800, Looking at Men explores how the modern male body was forged through the intimately linked professions of art and medicine, which deployed muscular models and martial arts to renew the beau id al. This ideal of the virile body derived from the athletic perfection found in the classical male nude. The study of human anatomy and dissection in both art and medicine underpinned a modern gladiatorial ideal, its representations setting the parameters not just of 'normal' virile masculinity but also its abject 'other'. Through the shared violence of human dissection and martial arts, male artists and medics secured their professional privilege and authority on the bodies of 'roughs'. First and foremost visual, this process has literary parallels in Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde. While embodying signs of dominant power and signalling differences of race, class, gender and sexuality, the virile masculine ideal contained its shadow, the threat of loss, of a Darwinian 'degeneration' that required vigilant intervention to ensure the health of nations.
Anthea Callen's lively and intelligent study casts a new eye on contributions by many lesser-known artists, as well as more familiar works by G ricault, Courbet, Dalou and Bazille through to Eakins, Thornycroft, Leighton and Tonks, and includes images that draw on photography and the popular visual cultures of boxing, wrestling and bodybuilding. Callen reassesses ideas of the modern male body and virile manhood in this exploration of the heteronormative, the homosocial and the homoerotic in art, anatomy and nascent anthropology.
Synopsis
Looking at Men considers varied and intriguing depictions of the male body in art and literature in the context of 19th-century Western understanding of anatomy and anthropology.