Always inspiring, but especially around Halloween. 'The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic' by @morbidanatomy founder @joanna.ebensteinâ â Of all the artifacts from the history of medicine, the #AnatomicalVenusâwith its heady mixture of beauty, eroticism and deathâis the most seductive. These life-sized dissectible wax women reclining on moth-eaten velvet cushionsâwith glass eyes, strings of pearls, and golden tiaras crowning their real human hairâwere created in eighteenth-century Florence as the centerpiece of the first truly public science museum. Conceived as a means to teach human anatomy, 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 neat categorical divides between life and death, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, entertainment and education, kitsch and art. The first book of its kind, 'The Anatomical Venus' features over 250 imagesâmany never before publishedâgathered by its author from around the world. Its extensively researched text explores the Anatomical Venus within her historical and cultural context in order to reveal the shifting attitudes toward death and the body that today render such spectacles strange. It reflects on connections between death and wax, the tradition of life-sized simulacra and preserved beautiful women, the phenomenon of women in glass boxes in fairground displays, and ideas of the ecstatic, the sublime and the uncanny.â â Read more via linkinbio.â â #anatomicalvenus #halloween #joannaebenstein #morbidanatomy #waxfigure #dissectablewoman https://www.instagram.com/p/CkWLLjmJGbh/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
