Incarnate

At the end of the  Quattrocento, the flesh color was called incarnato (from the Latin carne, “flesh”)  and assimilated to red.  Incarnato later gave the color term  “incarnate” which  Diderot used to describe the color of blood that shines through the skin of the characters in an oil on canvas by  Louis-Jean-François  Lagrenée  (Fig.  2) (Diderot, 1876).  The incarnate evokes indeed the blood that circulates under the skin and which tints it by transparency,  as  “under the blow of a categorical imperative of the in-between: between surface and depth” (Didi-Huberman, 2008). The French lexicographer Annie  Mollard-Desfour does not succeed in precisely determining the shade corresponding to the French term incarnat (incarnate): she classifies it in her dictionary red as “more or less bright red” (Mollard-Desfour, 2009), but also in that of pink, describing it as a  “bright pink” (Mollard-Desfour, 2002).