The Library
Transparent forms : tinting, whiteness and John Gibson's Venus
Tools
Hatt, Michael (2014) Transparent forms : tinting, whiteness and John Gibson's Venus. Sculpture Journal, Volume 23 (Number 2). pp. 185-196. doi:10.3828/sj.2014.18 ISSN 1366-2724.
Research output not available from this repository.
Request-a-Copy directly from author or use local Library Get it For Me service.
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/sj.2014.18
Abstract
The furore about the colouring of sculpture in Victorian Britain, and particularly John Gibson's Tinted Venus, is well known. But while some nineteenth-century critics made straightforward claims about the impropriety of coloured statues, the more important debate was about tinting, in which the ideal and real were not simply projected on to whiteness and polychromy, but on to transparency and opacity. Transparency, both literal and metaphorical, underpinned this meditation on the conceptual limits of ideal sculpture in terms of whiteness as both a colour and colourlessness, the characteristics of marble, and the metaphysical aspirations of the ideal. It also underpinned the racial aspect of polychromy, not in terms of literal skin colour, but of a distinction between races deemed able or unable to comprehend the ideal.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History of Art | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Sculpture Journal | ||||
Publisher: | Liverpool University Press | ||||
ISSN: | 1366-2724 | ||||
Official Date: | 16 October 2014 | ||||
Dates: |
|
||||
Volume: | Volume 23 | ||||
Number: | Number 2 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 185-196 | ||||
DOI: | 10.3828/sj.2014.18 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
View Item |