Sculpting Ideal Bodies: Medicine, Aesthetics, and Desire in the Artist’s Studio

In Paris, in November 1804, members of the Class of Fine Arts at the National Institute of France were asked to referee an unusual project. It was an ongoing scientific study conducted by the physician and artist Jean-Galbert Salvage (1772–1813) on the anatomical structure of the so-called Borghese Gladiator, the famed Greek sculpture, signed by the artist Agasias and dating from the first century BCE (fig. 6.1). Ever since the Gladiator was first dug up and installed at the Villa Borghese outside of Rome, sometime around 1611, art critics had hailed the figure as a paragon of male beauty,