The black sheep usually doesn't follow the crowd because every once in a while, the crowd is literally going the wrong way in mass

Of all the artefacts from the history of medicine, the Anatomical Venus

 

Back by popular demand beginning June 7, join author and Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein for The Anatomical Venus: Wax, Death, God and the Ecstatic, a class exploring this fascinating and complicated figure through richly illustrated lectures, readings, discussion, and a deep dive into her critically-acclaimed acclaimed book.

Reclining on velvet cushions with Venetian glass eyes, strings of pearls, and golden tiaras crowning their real human hair, Anatomical Venuses were created in eighteenth-century Florence to teach the general public about the mysteries of the human body. The Venus also tacitly communicated the relationship between the human body and a divinely created cosmos; between art and science, nature and mankind. Today, she both intrigues and confounds, troubling our contemporary categorical divides between life and death, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, entertainment and education, kitsch and art.

We will look at the history of anatomical models and their roots in memento mori-themed artworks; the use of wax was in funerary and death related arts; the ubiquity of the beautiful dead women in art, theatre, at the fairground, and in popular museums; the through-line of the ecstatic from spirituality to sexuality to drug use; the study of human anatomy; the uncanny as a product of the 18th-century enlightenment’s attempt to eliminate superstition; the body on display at the crossroads of science and spectacle; sexual fetishism including necrophilia and agalmatophilia (attraction to dolls or statues); and men who created effigies of their beloved.

In so doing, we will see how any piece of material culture might, when looked at deeply, become an object lesson—something that tells us not only about the past, and also who we have become.