Rotund bellies and double chins: Hogarth’s bodies

In his choice of subjects as in his painting technique, William Hogarth’s rendering of ‘life’ is remarkable for its tangible physicality. Be it for the materiality of its settings or for the variety of human characters, his pictures try to offer some kind of total ‘show’, with a view to representing Nature ‘as it is’ and in action, in opposition to the rarefied delusions of ‘high’ art which tended to show it as it ought to be, and ‘abstracted’. While some forms were certainly more ‘polite’ than others, a true representation of mankind had to allow for the presence of all its specimens. By composing ‘modern history paintings’ in which the most elegant forms converse with the plainest lines, Hogarth endowed variety with a new epistemological and aesthetic status that meant the inclusion of the ones and of ‘the others’. In all his pictures, it is always the human body which, from painful distortions to graceful curves, endows his art with its textural, formal and rhythmic qualities. Hogarthian beauty and grace, far from being abstract concepts, emerge as transient, “living”, physical phenomena, apprehended by the beholder through visual representations of the bodies’ natural and ‘peculiar’ movements.

Parodies of pompous knowledge: treatises on farting

This chapter analyses parodic treatises on winds, imagined as productions of the Rabelaisian tradition and of the new science of the Enlightenment. As science became more popular, this new popularity had its drawbacks: innumerable books, often pseudo-scientific ones, were written on every subject, and long before the advent of positivism, new scientists proclaimed the new physics had an explanation for everything. If the veneer of science allowed any subject to be turned into vain and pompous writings, then flatulence could also be an object of interest. Treatises or eulogies, these texts combine the parodies of several literary genres to form their own unique genre. From Pierre Hurtaut to Mercier de Compiègne or Swift, their authors rely on satirical winds to write on more serious matters.

The legibility of the bowels: Lichtenberg’s excretory vision of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress

This essay lays bare the rampant but thinly veiled scatology in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s renowned commentaries of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress. It shows that Lichtenberg finds all kinds of scatological objects – chamber pots, enemas, anal swabs – in Hogarth’s prints by applying what he calls the hermeneutics of hypochondria. Such a hermeneutics follows digressions, metaphorical associations, and metonymical connections to identify scatological objects in the images even where there are none. The resulting excremental vision of A Harlot’s Progress evidences, in Lichtenberg’s view, his own hypochondria and threatens the validity of his interpretations. But he also turns the scatological motif against the interpretive excess that produced it: excrement confronts the hypochondriacal interpreter with his own corporeal mortality and thus with the limits of his interpretive capacities as a human. Scatological satire therefore serves, in Lichtenberg’s conception, as something like a cynic self-therapy for interpretive hubris.

The belly and the viscera of the capital city

This chapter explores the catacombs and sewers of Paris: a maze of underground galleries that were essential to the proper functioning of the city above them. They create a vast network that resemble the vascular, respiratory and digestive systems of the human body. Unlike London, Paris was built with the very material taken from what later became the hole-ridden foundations of the city. To prevent Paris from collapsing, Louis XVI created an administration for the inspection and maintenance of the disused underground quarries of the city and its suburbs. At the same time, the Parisians increasingly complained and petitioned against the pestilential air exhaled by the city’s graveyards, as their grounds were as swollen as the belly of a corpse under the pressure of the gases of decomposition. This led to the closure of the graveyards and the relocation of the remains in the underground ossuary of Montsouris.

The saints of the entrails and the bowels of the earth

This article explores the texts and visual representations of the ‘saints of the bowels’ in order to establish an anthropological classification of aching bellies in early-modern France. A web of symbols is found in the materiality of the viscera. Thus, this article argues that representations of the belly as cave-like mirrors some images of the bowels of the earth. The “Saints of the Entrails”, St Erasmus and St Mammes, and Saint Elmo, all of whom were eviscerated during their martyrdom, represented many popular beliefs of rural communities who conflated images of the soil and images of the belly.

‘Words have no smell’: faecal references in eighteenth-century French théâtre de société

During the eighteenth century, society theatre saw the emergence of forms that evaded censorship. Many of these works break with the rules of classical propriety and freely evoke the lower body, both the belly and its excremental waste. These references have a clear carnivalesque dimension, but this chapter argues that they also have wider aesthetic and ideological implications.

Digesting in the long eighteenth century

This essay investigates the emergence and evolution of philosophical and scientific inquiries into the nature of human digestion in the long eighteenth century. It suggests that shifting perspectives on digestion encouraged deep anxieties to form around the gut. Ultimately, these concerns underpinned a new set of therapeutic regimes designed to safeguard both dietary and bodily health.

Visceral visions: art, pedagogy and politics in Revolutionary France

In late eighteenth-century France, at the seeming height of neoclassicism in the arts with its goal of idealized form al’antica in the depiction of the human figure, an intensified fascination with the visual experience of viscera emerged. Picturing viscera became increasingly common in visual culture. These developments occurred during a period of intense political and cultural upheaval and concomitant violence and bloodshed in France. Graphic anatomical plates, prints, and caricatures as well as wax models of viscera cast from the body parts of corpses, were used for pedagogical instruction as were écorché figures, either sculpted or cast from cadavers. Paintings were made that engaged the subject of death and disembowelment. We also see the actual participation in dissection by artists as well as anatomists. Artists, anatomists, and amateurs (sometimes working in concert) produced compelling images of what lies beneath the skin for a variety of purposes and functions.

The intestinal labours of Paris

This chapter focuses on the treatment of waste and sewage in eighteenth-century Paris and on the numerous small manufactures that flourished around the cesspits of the French capital and produced saltpeter for the conservation of dried meat, gut for musical instruments or for Spain’s chorizo factories, lime from the hides coming from the butcher’s shops… It also focuses on life underground, in the cellars, and on the extreme urban mortality due to the pervasive insalubrity generated by the digestive process at work in the city.

Introduction: entrails and digestion in the eighteenth century

This chapter discusses the ideas and themes underpinning the volume, contextualizing the importance of the gastric area in literary and medical culture, and more widely in the cultural imaginary of the eighteenth-century. It discusses the various ways in which stomach disorders, digestive motions, and belly-centred conceptions of the self and society complicate notions of the Enlightenment. Using examples from artisanal diaries, from scientific experiments, and from eighteenth-century novels, the chapter contextualizes and introduces the main themes of the volume: from revolutionary art’s visualizations of the viscera, to carnivalesque scatologies, to medical conceptions of the function of the stomach, and the city as bodily organism.