The world is becoming a busy noisy place and it is good to find a pastime that creates a different space, another dimension. Our paintings mean a lot to us because they remind us of lovely places we have visited and enable us to remember them in detail. It takes time to study the colours and contours of a scene. It may be that the drawing is an inadequate representation of the three dimensional scene spread out before us, how can it be anything else, but the process of trying to represent it on the two dimensions of the blank page is intellectually rewarding. The emerging picture is not just about the scene before you but also about your response to it at the time.

Throughout the fin de siecle, "energy" was a buzzword that was used far beyond the boundaries of the sciences to negotiate the formative scope as well as limits of Western modernity. The human body was positioned at the center of the visualization of this enigmatic drive of all movement in discourses on labor and economics, physical culture, sport, art, and literature. It was through the body that this all-pervading and conditioning physical principle as well as its perceptual qualities were to be made tangible. This volume is dedicated to these "energetic bodies." The transdisciplinary individual contributions trace body scenarios of force and energy over the course of history from 1800 to the peak phase around 1900 and up to the present.