It used to be widely accepted that the eighteenth-century emergence of the 'aesthetic' as a category of experience depended on an explicit denial of the pleasures, pains, and functions of the body. In recent years, however, scholars such as Aris Sarafianos have become increasingly interested in how medicine and theories of matter shaped the development of philosophical aesthetics, for instance highlighting Edmund Burke's close engagement with debates about the sensibility of the body in framing his account of the sublime.
In this paper, I go one step further, arguing that changing ideas about the body's involuntary functions - along with their pathologies and therapies - had a crucial role in the development of aesthetics and art theory in Britain during the first half of the 18th century. Drawing on a wide range of sources - including hitherto overlooked manuscripts - concerning the imperceptible motions of both plant and animal bodies, the paper shows how debates about the effects of air pressure, food, and exercise on the body's involuntary responses to the world outside it shaped some of the most important works of art theory.
I thus offer a radical reinterpretation of crucial works of art theory, from Jonathan Richardson's discourses on connoisseurship to Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, for the first time demonstrating how they responded to philosophical and medical attempts to describe and control the body's involuntary functions, from John Arbuthnot's An essay concerning the effects of air on human bodies to George Cheyne's famous therapies for the so-called 'English Malady'.
