Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century

David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002 (first published by Reaktion Books, London, 2002). 264 pp.

The great virtue of David Bindman 's Ape to Apollo is that it opens a number of different paths of inquiry into the same question: why did aesthetics and nice theory, two major yet seemingly incompatible achievements of the European - and especially German- eighteenth century, intersect so frequently? How to explain the recurring reliance of race theories on aesthetic criteria and, perhaps odder still, of aesthetics on racial categories? Bindman's book is an admirably lucid, wide-ranging, and instructive introduction to the main issues informing these questions (besides being beautifully designed and richly illustrated). It is also frustratingly shy about making conceptual claims and advancing strong readings of texts and images. Its strength lies not in putting forward a thesis guiding the whole book, but in its parts, each of which assesses an aspect of the topic carefully and knowledgeably.

The book's opening chapter provides us with a summary of how intellectuals manage the evidence of external human differences before the powerful concept of race takes hold in the later eighteenth century. Bindman assembles a gallery of (mainly British) exhibits from the early part of the century to show how the representation of non-Europeans oscillates, as one might expect, between idealizing and demoniztng them. By drawing on novelists (Aprirà Beim, Daniel Defoe), painters (William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds), and philosophers (John Locke, David Hume), he suggests that there is a certain logic to this oscillation, for where the Noble Savage makes an appearance, his counterpart, the Savage Savage, is never far behind, (This would have been a good place to explain why, in some detail.) Bindman also provides a review of the two main theories that at the time were taken to be scientific accounts of human variety. The more consequential of the...