The Human Body: Image and Emotion

  • I. Philippe Comar
Thames & Hudson: 1999. 159 pp. £6.95 (pbk)

The Human Body is not a book about science, nor is it written by a scientist, yet it touches on scientific and medical questions at many points. The author is an artist with an interest in the representation of the human body. This is a huge field and, accordingly, the book covers a long time span, essentially the beginnings of art to the present day.

Philippe Comar includes diverse images from the expected anatomical drawings and nudes to carvings, photographs, Greek statues, wax models, drawings and various items of art that use the human figure in some way. The illustrations are of a high quality and, although some will be familiar to most readers with an interest in the body, many are not, and hence their reproduction in this accessible, low-cost form is to be welcomed.

The organization of the book is unusual and rather unsatisfying. Pages are crammed with pictures, the main text and quotations. Each image also has a caption which responds to it in some way rather than being purely factual. This is indicative of the book's overall approach. It consists of five essays, which are meditations on themes such as “the outraged body” and “embodying desire”. Each one ranges freely in time and space, and their titles tell the reader nothing about their content.

At the end of the book, there is a short section comprising extracts from texts and supplementary pictures. It is clear that it is partly to be read for pleasure and partly to be used as a compilation of sources and ideas, although it makes no claims to be systematic.

The question of how, over many centuries, the human body has been a central concern for fields we now differentiate as art, medicine and science is formidably complex. These intersections have become a fashionable subject, but here they are often dealt with superficially. This is not an intellectually deep book.

It originally formed part of a series developed by the French publishers Gallimard, and it is fully in keeping with the significance accorded to haute vulgarisation in France. When done well, books that are heavily illustrated, well written and informative perform an invaluable service, as long as readers know what they are getting.

Although not a scholarly work, it is thought-provoking and I came across only one topic, physiognomy, that I felt was presented misleadingly. Because of its association with racial classifications, this is always a difficult subject to handle well. A more intellectually rigorous account would have to pay considerable attention to the contexts in which specific views of the body were generated, which is all but impossible in works of this type. Hence Comar's visual and verbal essays have their merits, as long as they are taken as being personal responses rather than authoritative scholarship.

The challenge of writing about the long-standing, intricate and fascinating intersections between the visual arts and knowledge of the human body, in a way that both does them justice and is accessible, remains.