About this item
Of all the artifacts from the history of medicine, the Anatomical Venus -- with its heady mixture of beauty, eroticism and death -- is the most seductive. These life-sized dissectible wax women reclining on moth-eaten velvet cushions -- with glass eyes, strings of pearls, and golden tiaras crowning their real human hair -- were 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.
About the Author
Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, writer and graphic designer. She is the founder of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series, and was cofounder and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, New York. Her work--which includes books, exhibitions, programming, and public speaking--seeks to explore the intersections of art and medicine, death and culture, science and metaphysics, and the objective and subjective.
She traces here lineage back to Judah Loew ben Bezalel, legendary creator of The Golem in 16th century Prague.
Photo by Shannon Taggart.
