Incarnate

Adam and Eve ( Maarten van Heemskerck , Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg ). The different flesh tones serve to emphasize the gender difference.

Incarnate (also karnat , carnation , flesh tone , flesh color or skin color ), from Latin carnis = "flesh", describes the skin color of people of European descent in art .

Incarnate

Inkarnat is a term from art, more precisely from painting and barrel painting (painting of sculptures, etc.). It refers to the color tones chosen by the artist, which are used to depict naked human body parts, i.e. the skin .

The incarnate is mixed from the colors red and white as well as other matching tones: ocher , sienna and other brown tones, sometimes blue or green are also used. Since human skin is not the same color everywhere (for example face, hands, feet, elbows, knees), and the light that falls differently on every part of the body also has a significant influence on skin color, a single color cannot simply be used for all skin areas are mixed. A good flesh can be recognized by the fact that the different parts of the body each have their own color.

In barrel painting , with the development of wood carving by the Carnat painters, a separate profession has developed. Until the late baroque period they specialized in painting the uncovered body parts of sculptures. In the hierarchy of this craft guild, Carnat painters were among the best-paid specialists.

In archeology, too, the term incarnate is used to describe the surface of the body, especially the facial features of portraits .

Examples

Depending on the art epoch, style, artist and work, the incarnate can look very different.

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  Madonna and Child from Horgenzell-Ringgenweiler (detail). Limewood with old frame, originally wood-sighted, Upper Swabia around 1500

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  Raffael , Portrait of a Boy (around 1515)

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  Peter Paul Rubens , Boreas kidnaps Oreithya (around 1620)

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  Jean-Honoré Fragonard , Portrait of an Old Lady (18th century)

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  Portrait of Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger (1831)

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  William Adolphe Bouguereau : L'Amour et Psyché, enfants (1890)

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  Pierre-Auguste Renoir , After the Bath (1910)

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  Adolf Erbslöh : Girl with a Red Skirt (1910)

Heraldry

Possible hue for heraldic incarnate
color code: # FBD097

In heraldry , meat color is one of the heraldic tinctures . Coats of arms with flesh-colored common figures are often emblazoned as "in natural colors" .

literature

• Daniela Bohde , Mechthild Fend (Ed.): Neither skin nor flesh. The incarnate in art history (= New Frankfurt Research on Art. Vol. 3). Gebrüder Mann, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-7861-2545-7 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ William Jervis Jones: Historical Lexicon of German Color Designations , p. 1612.