The Deceptive Surface: Perception and Sculpture’s “Skin”

In the eighteenth century, sculptors such as Antonio Canova often experimented with polychromy, using wax or grind water to subtly tint their figures’ flesh. In this article, I examine viewers’ discomfort with these surface treatments. I argue that viewers reacted negatively to the colored surface of works such as Hebe and Penitent Magdalene because they found it to be deceptive. First, encaustic treatments mellowed the marble surface, giving modern works the appearance of antiquities. Second, the “reality effect” created by color threatened sculpture’s status as high art. Finally, hyper-realism also suggested that the sculpture’s surface was exactly that—that is to say, only a surface, a shell that contained the messy reality of the body. The polychrome surface therefore oscillated between ancient and modern, flesh and stone, penetrable and impenetrable and raised larger aesthetic, philosophical and scientific issues.