| Within works of art, florid skin exhibits an ambiguity in keeping with its polyvalence in real life. In this thesis, I hope to tease out some of these meanings by examining the significance of red cheeks in portraits of male sitters and exploring how the motif's meaning changed over time. In the first chapter of this study, I will address two mid-sixteenth century Venetian paintings by Paolo Veronese and Giovanni Battista Moroni; in the second chapter, I will transition to a discussion of early-seventeenth century English paintings, with a focus on likenesses by the court painter Anthony van Dyck; and in the third chapter, I will consider a pair of anonymous, mid-nineteenth century American photographs. Drawing upon the visual evidence contained in these representations and various primary sources from the respective time periods, I will suggest that the import of ruddy skin in images of men gradually evolved from humoral signifier of sanguine manliness to fraught indicator of racial whiteness. In other words, the blush assumed an increasingly racial dimension over time, while slowly losing some of its traditional ties to Humorism. In making this claim, I do not mean to deny the blush's manifest multivalence. Indeed, I will discuss a number of its other associations throughout this essay, many of which overlap and coexist (sometimes uneasily) in a single image. |
