Animal attitudes: Motion and emotion in eighteenth-century animal representation

Abstract

At the Royal Garden in mid-eighteenth-century Paris a circle of artists and naturalists at work on Buffon's Natural History set and maintained the standard for French animal representation in illustrated natural history, fables and theatre. The images produced by this group participated in the turn of European natural philosophy from the physical sciences to the life sciences and the consequent erosion of academic and vulgar notions of the animalmachine. The depiction of motion in the static animal image thus functioned across domains as part of an experimental effort in the new view of animal physiology, behaviour and psychology. © 2010 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.