Study of the material remains of Greek and Roman antiquity played a key role in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of the modern disciplinary formation of Classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Over the same period, it was also central to the development of racial thought in the spheres of aesthetics, ethnology, and historical anthropology. After articulating a conception of race that, following Stuart Hall and Noémie Ndiaye, treats it as a ‘sliding signifier’ drawing upon an archive or repertoire of racial tropes, this chapter discusses how, in studying Greek and Roman monuments under the sign of ‘art’, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship attended to material antiquity in a manner that was both formed by and formative of constructions of race emerging between the ‘Age of Discovery’ and the European ‘Enlightenment’. It explores the relation of classical art historiography to other racializing discourses of difference along three key axes: ‘Culture’, ‘Differentiation’, and ‘Beauty’, attending to the role of environmental or climate theory, heredity, and physiognomy in emerging theories that sought to explain the diversity of ancient and modern peoples as evidenced by their visual and material productions.

Physiognomy, a genre related to cosmography, taught observers how to scrutinize profiles in order to sum up people’s characters and established benchmarks for practical skills like visual comparison and facial inspections. Printers of this content privileged the visual attachments of these texts, directing readers to use images to guide empirical activity.

Some of the most outward signs of ageing are mediated through the skin. This chapter concentrates on how skin care products chimed with understandings of what could be achieved by way of rejuvenation. Using a diverse range of sources, including advertising material which appeared in household magazines and newspapers, the company records of Boots, market research surveys, and ephemera relating to the products themselves, this chapter triangulates the myriad claims about what skin care products could achieve against prevailing social concerns with ageing, knowledge about the skin and conceptions of beauty. The principal argument is that through the twentieth century youthful skin became deeply entwined with a particular form of beauty: the two became inseparable and skincare preparations appealed to those who sought to increase both their attractiveness and youthfulness.