Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lafont, Anne

Titel

How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker: Art Historical Perspectives on Race

Ist Teil von

• Eighteenth-century studies, 2017-10, Vol.51 (1), p.89-113

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article seeks to demonstrate how artistic production and discourse in the eighteenth century produced tools of observation and analysis that allowed human beings to be differentiated as well as implicitly classifed on a moral scale, an enterprise that would later veer into explicit racism. The study isolates this long, fumbling era of pictorial and pigmentary development by demonstrating how, by a visual figuration or representation, a natural element--skin color--can be manipulated synthetically to the point of providing evidence or proof of human hierarchies. It also better defines the role played by the fine arts in the imaginary and scientific process that embedded the category of race into that of skin color, the focus being on (supposed) white and black skin colors, as they were the main landmarks in the debates and works of art of Enlightenment dealings with race.