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Accepted for publication in Art History; final version pending 'The body politic, like the body of man, begins to die as soon as it is born, and bears within it the seeds of its own dissolution.' Rousseau, Confessions 1 'Oh sad nineteenth century! / GIRODET' 2 When the French painter Anne-Louis Girodet exhibited his last major Salon painting, Pygmalion and Galatea (plate 1), in 1819, a bemused review in the Journal des dames et des modes noted that the figure of Eros, who unites the eponymous protagonists, 'seems to conduct (all jokes aside) a galvanic experiment.' 3 The review referred to a bright concentration of light that passes between the knees of Eros and the inanimate statue of Galatea, who is shown coming to life in front of the man who sculpted her. This galvanic-or, as we would call it, electric-experiment would have had several connotations for the Journal's readers. Named after the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, whose experiments with frog legs were widely known throughout Europe (plate 2), a 'galvanic' experiment described the transmission of electricity through human and animal bodies. 4 More colloquially, galvanism suggested to a French audience both visual and structural transformations: an intense luminous discharge accompanied by the animation of something inanimate. Its inclusion in Girodet's Pygmalion and Galatea served as a timely analogy for the process of bringing a statue to life.

In 1804 the French painter Anne-Louis Girodet drew a small post-mortem portrait of Benoît-Agnès Trioson, the sole biological child of the artist's mentor, Benoît-François Trioson (fig. 1). The boy's wavy hair is rendered in fluid, decisive streaks of charcoal, but his facial features-the contours of his jaw, lips, nose, and eye-are much harder to make out. The boy seems to fade from view, as if the artist had moved quickly to record his features one last time before they slipped away altogether. The drawing serves as a postscript, of sorts, to a trio of painted portraits Girodet executed of the young Benoît-Agnès in 1797 (fig. 2), 1800 (fig. 3), and 1803 (fig. 4), a portrait series that was abruptly brought to a close with the child's untimely death in 1804. Both in their serial treatment of a young child and in their precarious placement between the final throes of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon's First Empire, the paintings are rare documents of the affective terrain of boyhood at the end of the eighteenth century. Girodet paid exceptionally close attention to the physical and psychic particularities of youth and in doing so reflected, it has been argued, a dreamy, rebellious, and melancholic vision of childhood memorably articulated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile of 1762. i This notion of childhood was similarly bound up in evolving philosophical, social, and political changes underway within the bourgeois model of the nuclear family. ii But childhood was not merely a topic of interest for its own stake; it was a concept freighted with the competing claims about equality, freedom, and morality that had urgent political stakes at the twilight of the eighteenth century.

Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This work reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists drew upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them.

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