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Scholarship for research into the art of existence and appearance

On 22 September 2010, the L’Oréal Foundation awarded its third annual research scholarship entitled "The art of existence and appearance" to two brilliant young historians: Irène Salas and Antoine Roullet.

This scholarship encourages young social science researchers whose work is focused on appearance and who make good use of the documentary collections in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library of France, BnF).

The winner, Irène Salas, has thus received acclaim for her doctoral thesis entitled "The construction of Appearing in the Renaissance: Skin-bleaching Techniques in the Modern Age and the Discovery of the Skin in the Sixteenth Century". Antoine Roullet received a special award for his bold work on "Nuns and Beauty: the Construction of a Constrained Appearance."

The partnership with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France was initiated in 2008. This year its particular beauty, so to speak, is that two researchers specialising in appearance have been singled out for the first time.

The first scholarship was awarded in 2008 to Sarah Nechtstein, a PhD student at Université Paris X-Nanterre, whose research project "Be clean, smell good, appear elegant"drew on the BNF's collections, particularly documents on perfumery. In 2009, a philosopher and man of the theatre, Stéphane Poliakov, a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, was acclaimed for his project "Images on Faces: Make-up used by actors in France from the 17th to the 20th century."

You can see a video of the 2010 scholarship award ceremony at the BnF and interviews with the winners by clicking on this Terrafemina report

Interviews with Irène Salas and Antoine Roullet Irène Salas, a researcher at the EHESS working on the construction of appearing in the Renaissance, face bleaching techniques in the modern period and the discovery of the skin in the 16th century.

Why did people bleach their skin during the Renaissance?
From the 16th to 18th century representations of beauty were based on the face's whiteness, which attested to the soul's cleanliness but also became a social norm expressing the superiority of the idle class, the nobility. Bleaching was the cornerstone of cosmetic culture at the time. Unfortunately, the preparations were often hazardous to health and came under increasing criticism during the period.

How can you claim that those dangerous practices enabled skin to be seen as something noble?
It does seem odd, but the Renaissance was a turning point in how people looked at skin. Using those products seemed to deny its existence as an alterable body tissue but gradually helped make that recognition possible. The skin acquired the status of a living surface when Enlightenment physicians took a critical view of cosmetic bleaching. And beyond that recognition as a surface, the skin is also recognised in its depth.



Antoine Roullet:
Nuns and Beauty: The Construction of a constrained Appearance

Your work focuses on nuns and beauty in 16th- to 17th-century Carmelite convents, which, more than anywhere else, we imagine as places where appearances were rejected.Yes, at first sight the convent is a place that condemns appearances and appearing and stigmatises attention to the body and artifice as a hypocritical manipulation of the self. It's actually a place of stolen glances where each nun seeks a judgement on her way of being in the other's gaze. Attention to the body and posture are all the more important to position oneself in the convent's society, set up power relations and establish a reputation because the nuns are not allowed to speak.

What forms did those "beauty" practices and that attention to the body take?
First, considering the garments nuns wear, attention was limited and reduced to the hands, face and feet; these constraints required attention to detail. To do penance they plucked out their eyelashes, covered themselves in ashes, dirtied their skin and put on motley fabrics, not as a sign of ostentation but as a mark of disgrace. They wore conspicuous hairshirts, crosses and crowns of thorns as signs of penance for their disgrace. Oddly, high society women adopted the same scenes of mortification in their make-up practices.
On the other hand, embodying virtue implied restoring a canon of beauty based on the skin's candid whiteness and rosy cheeks, signs of prudishness and modesty.
In both cases, whether overturned or imitated, the codes of appearing are not that different from the period's high society make-up codes.

Légend : Irène Salas, winner of "The art of existence and appearance" scholarship awarded by the L’Oréal Foundation, and Antoine Roullet, winner of the Jury's Special Prize, at the presentation of the scholarship, in the presence of Bruno Racine, BNF President.

Photo credit: Gil Lefauconnier