When waiting for a friend in a busy public place, we spot them by their outline long before their features come into focus. It’s this border between flesh and the world that is the starting point and organising principle of Georges Vigarello’s inventive book on the body in history.
The word “silhouette” turns out to derive from a finance minister at the court of Louis XV, who managed to last only eight months in office: one theory is that it was Étienne de Silhouette’s flickering impact on public life that gave rise to the idea he was a kind of human shadow. Another is that the former minister liked pushing his friends up against the walls of his chateau and drawing around their edges. Either way, it was only in the middle of the 18th century that the pursuit of representing people in profile made much sense at all. Thanks to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on individual rather than collective identity, people were now able to imagine themselves as unique beings rather than anonymous functionaries of the cosmos.
Put simply, there were things that made you instantly legible to the rest of the world: a receding chin, a pouter pigeon chest, a cockatoo shock of hair. Viewed straight-on, these features could get overlooked in a welter of distracting detail of costume, gesture and speech. But turn sideways, hold still, and it could only be you.
Just like photography 100 years later, silhouetting evolved into a democratic and protean practice. Young ladies who would have found portraiture far beyond them could now make a stab at taking their friends’ likenesses. The pioneering physiologist Johann Kaspar Lavater devised a machine to draw multiple subjects in profile and built up a database of physical features to cross-reference with character traits: a bulging forehead meant brains, a large nose denoted unruly passions. And then there was the artist Augustin Edouart, who used scissors and black paper to capture the minutest axes and flexions of the human form. With his clever cut-outs, Edouart rendered the tilt of the waist, the curve of the calves and the slant of the torso with such precision that it was startling for subjects to look at their silhouette and realise that this was exactly how the world saw them. Personality no longer resided in the face alone, but had become a whole-body phenomenon.
It was now, too, that caricaturists’ scabrous art came into its own: Hogarth’s cartoons would scarcely have been possible without this new emphasis on line over mass. In the early 19th century, satirists proceeded to conjure up slutty duchesses and puffed-up politicians in just a few bold strokes. Vigarello’s examples are mostly drawn from French art, but you can easily transpose these to the British context, and in particular the work of James Gillray. It was Gillray who drew William IV with that instantly recognisable pineapple-shaped head, morphed puffy-faced Pitt into a mushroom, and captured Lady Worsley’s famously naked bottom. Colour washes might be added to enhance the visual pleasure (Pitt is a study in mycological buff and fawn, Lady Worsley a lovely blushing pink), but it was the outline that told the story, and pinned down the details of wriggling human folly on the page.
It didn’t just involve gawping at celebrities. As thousands of people piled into the cities from the countryside, drawing well-known individuals in outline gave way to what Vigarello calls a “morphology” of human forms, a whole library of physical generalisations. Here was the banker with his prosperous stomach, there the beggar’s instinctive cringe and the society lady’s stuck-up nose. There were significant shifts, too, as new understandings about the way the body worked filtered through into public consciousness. In the 1830s, with oxygen now identified as the key to life itself, silhouettes showed everyone with puffed-out chests, as if the upper part of the human torso had permanently expanded from all that sucking in of air.
This sounds harmless enough, if a bit broad brush. But Vigarello is alive to the way this impulse to reduce the human form to a series of types soon came to enshrine a troubling biological essentialism. The Jewish man’s hooked nose, the African woman’s large bottom, the career criminal’s sloping forehead – all became fixed tropes that started to circulate not just on the page but in people’s imaginations. By the end of the 19th century the eugenicists were poring over these details, convinced that the body’s outline told you everything you needed to know, not just about a person’s physical condition but their moral worth.
Almost as damaging was the way that flesh-and-blood men and women started to internalise a sense of what their shape ought to be. “Vital statistics”, once a useful way of measuring yourself for some new clothes, became instead a challenge and a reproach. What made – still makes – any such project of physical self-improvement so exhausting was that the ideal silhouette was always changing, with the curves and swoops of 1910 giving way to the slenderness of the 1920s, which turned into the healthily athletic form of the 1930s. For men, too, there was a pressure to morph from a tube to a barrel, to a coathanger, as the decades passed and new outlines became modish. And all this was supposed to be achieved despite the handicap of being born with only one body, a body that became stiffer, fatter and more resistant to self-sculpting as the years passed.
Vigarello has written an elegant, clever book. At least, I think he has. A clunky translation from the French means that the text feels turgid – not merely complex in the way that French academic writing can be, but plodding. Still, even this can’t detract from the visual joy of this handsome volume. We move from Gillray’s cutting, raucous take-downs of late Georgian silliness, through Caspar David Friedrich’s brooding romanticism to the gallery of social types that illustrates early editions of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine collection.
Nor are these images all, or even mostly, monochrome. One of the main points of Vigarello’s argument is that, while the silhouette might have started out as a dense shadow thrown across pristine white, it soon became incorporated into every kind of artistic practice. For what is cubism, really, but an exploration into line? And then there’s graphic poster art, starting with Toulouse-Lautrec, pushing on through interwar advertisements for the Cunard line to Andy Warhol’s experiments with repetition and replication. The book’s most striking image, though, is a film still from Blue Hawaii (1961) showing Elvis Presley on a skateboard. Stripped to his trunks, Presley is all tense trapezoid muscle, with huge flaring shoulders. Could it be, Vigarello asks, that the King has donned body armour against the first stirrings of the women’s liberation movement which we know, but he doesn’t, lies just around the corner?
• The Silhouette: From the 18th Century to the Present Day, translated by Augusta Dörr, is published by Bloomsbury Arts. To order a copy for £30 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
