The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
of sunglasses, which will not only shield our eyes from the sun, but also
serve as a telecommunication instrument or a computer running on solar
energy.
The face is masked, the face as mask. What lies behind that smooth
brown skin, those elongated eyes and thick eyebrows, that round red
mouth and bobbed hair? Perhaps nothing more than the act itself of
hiding something. The idea of a bare face to be inscribed with the ‘signs’
of makeup ignores the fact that such nakedness is already inscribed,
scored by a thousand tales alluding to age, nutrition, medicine, love,
origins and so on.
Retracing history and searching in the genealogy of the face for something
that might help us understand its phenomenology, a concept stands
out: facies, the surface appearance characterizing a type, which ancient
medicine read as signs referring to the body’s general state and its collocation
in space. The face as moveable territory, whose signs Hippocratic medicine,
exemplified by the work of Galen, scrutinized, not in terms of
anatomy, but of their connection with the surrounding world and with one
another, in that state of otherness and oneness intrinsic to every living
being. Yet those signs were regulated by a strict morality: in Galen physical
health (of face and body), the source of all ‘natural’ beauty, is opposed to
‘false’ beauty obtained through strange artifice. Cosmetica-commotica:
Plato clearly distinguishes between the two, linking the art of cosmetics to
rhetoric, sophistry and the culinary arts, while care of the body is linked to
gymnastics, medicine and dialectics. The Platonic condemnation of
makeup poses the problem of legitimacy as one of truth – or vice versa.
Nevertheless, ancient medicine wasn’t able to draw a precise boundary
between the two arts: bodily health requires remedies that waver between
nature and artifice, and thus Galen’s prescriptions for lightening the face or
smoothing the skin are implicitly inspired by a philosophy of beauty as
construct and culture, not nature. For classical writers, makeup was part
of the art of seduction, whether for courtesans or in literary transpositions
of the ars amatoria. Ovid ignores morality and nature and praises makeup
as part of sensual, narcissistic pleasures – est etiam placuisse sibi quaecumque
voluptas – and he collects recipes and prescriptions for beauty
treatments that have all the ‘flavour’ of culinary recipes. Irony at Plato’s
expense: commotica and gastronomy?
A healthy face thus seems inevitably linked to writing, whether directly
on its surface, or in the prescribing and describing of makeup. The prescription
evades the norm, however, and is always accompanied by a
‘degustation’, as in culinary recipes, that relies on memory and the description
of the way in which the recipe was followed on a particular occasion
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