The search for ‘essential’ beauty and the transformation of race, from skin color to the shape of heads. But not in eighteenth-century Spain
Alejandro Malaspina led the largest scientific expedition (1789–94) to the Spanish colonies in America and Asia, one that lasted five years. Malaspina’s two sloops, christened after Cook’s ships, packed cadres of naturalists, cartographers, and painters.
But Malaspina’s was a political expedition too. A Newtonian, Malaspina sailed off with “axioms” that his expedition sought to test. Could colonies of “conquest” be transformed into “commercial” ones? Malaspina emphasized the large historical differences separating Spanish from English and French colonies. There were seemingly irreconcilable factions in America limiting the promise of commercial reform. After testing and confirming many of these ideas in the course of the expedition, Malaspina recommended no further integration of colonies and metropoles because their interests could never align. Malaspina recommended that the monarchy break up into a commonwealth of several independent kingdoms. These ideas, and Malaspina’s involvement in seeking to oust Prime Minister Manuel de Godoy, landed Malaspina in jail. In Lo bello en la naturaleza, Sánchez Arteaga collects the writings of Malaspina and several members of his expedition on a topic unconnected to the political and scientific goals of the expedition: What is beauty?
Sánchez Arteaga attributes to Malaspina and his expedition’s naturalists, painters, and patrons a set of 33 essays, published under pseudonyms in the Diario de Madrid in 1795, the year after the expedition had returned to Spain, addressing the nature of “beauty.” The study of human emotion prompted by “beauty” in nature, buildings, plays, music, and other humans absorbed many of the leading intellectuals of the Enlightenment and Romanticism alike: John Locke, the Earle of Shaftsbury, Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Winkelman, among others. So Malaspina and his crew were not alone. Sánchez Arteaga argues that Malaspina exemplified the late Enlightenment turn to ‘beauty’ to define race.
Beauty transformed late Enlightenment discussions of ‘race’. Research on skin color suggested that pigmentation was not an essential physical marker of differences and that it could no longer serve to justify an objective classification of human types. Folks like Shaftsbury insisted that there was something innate to the nature of beauty. Essential beauty lay beyond idiosyncrasies in personal taste. Late-eighteenth-century German aesthetics rendered neoclassical bodies and buildings into the normative, objective standard of essential beauty. According to neoclassicists, the Greek body (and buildings) appeared to be built on a harmony of proportions, indicating a hidden, numerical, objective structure. German neoclassicism found in heads a harmony of ratios between the parts (nose, ears, eyes). Craniometry, therefore, became the new foundation of human taxonomy, with the head standing as the equivalent of sexual organs in plants for botanical taxonomies. Harmony of ratios and proportions created the emotion of beauty and through it an objective classification of humans. Although German philosophers like Kant and Johan F Blumenbach named racial types using colors (brown, black, yellow, red, white), they built their systems on heads to signify essential, deeper distinctions.
Verhandeling van Petrus Camper over het natuurlijk verschil der wezenstrekken in menschen van onderscheiden landaart en ouderdom; over het schoon in antyke beelden en gesneedene steenen (Adriaan Gilles Camper, 1791)
Verhandeling van Petrus Camper over het natuurlijk verschil der wezenstrekken in menschen van onderscheiden landaart en ouderdom; over het schoon in antyke beelden en gesneedene steenen (Adriaan Gilles Camper, 1791)
Sánchez Arteaga focuses primarily on a short philosophical meditation written by Malaspina while in prison and his four essays in Diario de Madrid (co-written with his patron, the beautiful Marquesa of Matallana). The latter four essays formed part of a larger dispute on beauty with other members of the expedition. Sánchez Arteaga argues that these writings reflect Malaspina’s preoccupation with the evaluation of essential beauty as the foundation of race.
The evidence, however, does not fit this interpretation. First, Malaspina sought to ground beauty on skin color, not heads. The entire argument hinged on Matallana’s own bodily attraction and pale skin color. There is no reference in these writings, say, to facial angles. Malaspina’s rivals relentlessly mocked Malaspina for believing in the objective reality of beauty as whiteness. Second, Malaspina was only one of ten authors involved in the dispute. None of the others believed in beauty as whiteness and whiteness as an “essential” and objective measure. Third, participants had little use for the ethnographic material collected by the expedition
What really stands out in this late eighteenth-century dispute on esthetics and race is that neo-classical, German theories of race did not gain any purchase in Spain. Nine of ten participants firmly believed that beauty was no more than an utterly subjective emotion. The lesson that these readings seem to teach us is that Spain with a large colonial empire was a very different place than, say, Prussia, without colonies but where Kant grew to believe in transcendental reason and cosmopolitan ethics while classifying races on transcendental beauty objectively expressed in the shape of skulls. We need to go back to Malaspina’s own epistemological warning, expressed in his political axioms about America: We should quit applying northern-European models to the interpretation of stubbornly unyielding realities.
