ABSTRACT
The chapter engages with the influential French art dictionary, the Encyclopédie méthodique des Beaux-Arts (Methodical encyclopedia of the fine arts, 1788–1791), by Claude-Henri Watelet and Pierre-Charles Levesque. It focuses on three interrelated entries on colour, colouring and flesh tones. Emphasizing the kinship between the terms, Watelet draws on an art theoretical tradition going back to fourteenth-century Italy in which the question of colouring was closely tied to the challenges of a lifelike rendering of the human body. The comment demonstrates how this tradition was taken up and modified in French late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art discourse as it responded to a new understanding of the human body's colour as situated in the epidermis in the field of anatomy and emerging racial anthropology. As skin colour developed into a powerful marker of race, Watelet slightly, but significantly, reformulated ideals of (mostly female) beauty and whiteness. According to the art theorist, beautiful skin was not simply white, but transparent and finely textured, with hints of red, indicating liveliness and the ability to blush, as well as having the exclusive capacity to reflect light. He thus made a claim for white skin's aesthetic and moral superiority by linking it to a key value of the Enlightenment.
