Looking at Men Art Anatomy and the Modern Male Body

Looking at Men : Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body
ISBN: 9780300112948
Publication Date: 28 August 2018

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 idal. 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 Callens lively and intelligent study casts a new eye on contributions by many lesser-known artists, as well as more familiar works by Gricault, 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.