Art and law have a troubled relationship that is defined by steep hierarchies placing art subject to law. But beyond the interplay of transgressions and regulations, manifest in a number of high-profile cases, there are more intricate connections between the two disciplines. By expanding the notion of law into the concept of a hybrid collectif of legality, the hierarchies flatten and unfamiliar forms of possible interactions emerge. Legality, the quality of something being legal, serves as a model to show the capricious workings of law outside of its own profession. New juridical actors—such as algorithms—already challenge traditional regulatory powers and art could assume a similar role. This thesis offers a point of departure for the involvement of art in shaping emergent legalities that transcend existent jurisdictions through computer code.

In this thesis, I investigate the anatomical excesses represented in the works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In recent years, art historical scholarship on Ingres has multiplied after being quiescent for much of the twentieth century, as contemporary scholars perceive the unusual contradictions in his works. I introduce the concepts of pathological versus imaginary distortions. Pathological distortions are distortions that represent diseased bodies, such as the goiters in many of Ingres's female figures, whereas imaginary distortions are not anatomically possible, such as the five extra vertebrae in the Grande Odalisque. Ingres employed both of these types of these distortions in his bodies, and I discuss how these two types of distortions can be read differently.

My thesis is that Ingres employed extended anatomical variations-in his paintings, most notably in his female figures, for several reasons: to reconcile his anxiety about originality while remaining within the tradition of Classicism and "disegno," to pay homage to his predecessors who were also the masters of line, and to highlight his command of line and drawing. Though Ingres has never been a strictly Neoclassical artist in the Davidian tradition, the Romantic elements of his work are underlined further by these anatomical variations.

This thesis analyzes how several well-known biographies of popular nineteenth-century British literary figures overturned and upset the usual heroic literary biographies that typified the genre during the Victorian era. Popular public opinion in the nineteenth century was that literary biographies existed as moral guideposts--designed to instruct and edify readers. Richard D. Altick's theory of biographical conventions of reticence--which contends that ultimately literary biographies were committed to establishing or preserving an idealized image of the author--is utilized to explore the nuances of how certain radical biographies in which the biographer is forthright about the subject's private life displeased and disturbed the public. In order to illustrate this study's central argument, several literary biographies that were considered among the most radical of the late Victorian period--John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, James Anthony Froude's Life of Carlyle, Mathilde Blind's George Eliot, and John Cordy Jeaffreson's The Real Shelley--are analyzed as case studies. These biographies of writers' lives made heroic figures appear human, vulnerable, petty, et cetera by exposing private life matters in a public biography--something that was not done in an age that called for discreet biographies of its literary icons. Victorian periodicals such as magazines and newspapers assist in ascertaining just how the British public reacted to these biographies, and the ramifications they possessed for worshipping literary idols. Additionally explored are the implications that candid literary biographies had for Victorian author-worship and the role of literature, authors, and biography in British society. This study concludes with a discussion of the implications that these candid literary biographies had into the early twentieth century with the publication of Lytton Strachey's "deflated" biography, Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, and summarizes overall findings and conclusions.