Featured on PDR in the collection Looking Backward: Images of Rückenfiguren (ca. 1497–1925)

“The possession of a back — a side that can neither see nor be seen by the person to whom it belongs — literally pursues us all our lives”, writes the scholar Trisha Urmi Banerjee. “It probably exists, but I have not yet found, in the history of philosophy, a prolonged meditation on the back’s lack of ocular power.” Art history too tends to privilege the body’s anterior plane: what with those luminous eyes, the face’s limitless gradient of expression, a sensitive solar plexus offered up to the viewer. Yet there is a microtradition in the history of art known as the Rückenfigur (back figure), which comes to predominate in German Romanticism, that takes the back seriously as a surface of visual attention.