En torno al cuerpo

The body is recently the center of growing interest in the human sciences. Its secrets are far from being fully revealed. Recent studies insist that the body has a history and that this history encompasses appearance and depth, desire and power, fall and apotheosis, life and death. This is the context in which this book intends to enter, appealing to the tools of the historian of images. Until today, the traditional aesthetic commentary has been essentially situated in the field of appearances, hiding the confrontation with what surpasses them; the visible is not only a matter of surface. The body is a representation, inseparable from the gaze that elaborates it and from the "media" that exhibit it, inseparable from its own skin wrapping (makeup, incisions, armor, veils, adornments) and translated by words, letters, color films , marble blocks, projection screens. This book studies the role played in the construction of the body's imaginary by beliefs, the effects of consciousness, aesthetic tastes, desires, whims, obstructions and fears.