ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Art-Historical Origins of Sexual Selection

• In Event: Genealogy & Inheritance between Passion, Law, and Science, II

English Abstract

In 1834, from Chile, as he circled the globe on the Beagle, Charles Darwin wrote home to a friend in Cambridge: “I yet recollect there was a man called Raffaelle Sanctus. How delightful it will be once again to see in the FitzWilliam, Titian’s Venus.” How did the imaginary museum of European art history––which lived in Darwin’s mind so vividly––shape his genealogical understanding of the natural world? This talk will sketch some potential avenues of inquiry for thinking through that question. Special attention will be placed on Darwin’s most visually-oriented theory––the theory of sexual selection––as an aspect of the naturalist’s theory-building that drew a particularly robust inheritance from non-scientific thinking. I will situate the theory of Sexual Selection in genealogical relation to the image-making activities of Darwin’s own children (which the scientist studied), and to motifs of aesthetic choosing that recur across the history of European painting.

Author

• Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Institute of Fine Arts