I can’t justify purchasing all the expensive science and art books I really want, so they languish on my Amazon wishlist forever. A case in point would be Patrick Mauries’s Cabinets of Curiosities, an oversized hardbound book with lots of yummy full color pictures. The Amazon price hovers around $47 (the price on the jacket is $75). I hadn’t seen it, even used, for less than $30. Too spendy.
I recently got an email promoting a new comparison shopping website, Booksprice.com, so I tested it out on the Mauries book. The result? DeepDiscount.com currently has it for $12 with free shipping! I was suspicious, so I ordered it (I can usually justify spending $12) and it arrived completely shrink-wrapped, in perfect condition. If you also like wonder cabinets, it would be a very pretty (and now affordable) addition to your collection - although somewhat light on scholarship.
Incidentally, Booksprice lets you import your Amazon wishlist and save it, which is a very useful feature. It’s also refreshingly uncluttered with ads, even aesthetically pleasing, as third-party comparison shopping sites go. So you might consider trying it on your own wishlist. I didn’t get any more results as dramatic as the Mauries book, but I’m going to keep checking.
There is a common denominator that links all these artists. It is the profound joy that all feel who observe the natural world with a sustained and devoted intensity.
- Sir David Attenborough
I was tickled to see this charming Telegraph article on a natural illustration exhibition entitled “Amazing, Rare Things” (beginning March 2 at the Queen’s Gallery, Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh). I was even more tickled to realize it was written by Sir David Attenborough. His nature documentary series, like The Living Planet (1984), had a huge impact on me as a child. Even now, if I visualize the concept “ecosystem,” I see not empty savanna, but David Attenborough in the savanna, wearing his genteel exploratory khakis, whispering or shouting depending on what sort of fascinating creature he was stalking.
Even when he was being sandblasted or frozen or heckled by lyrebirds, Attenborough always seemed genuinely delighted to be there. That’s why his words above, about nature artists, ring so true. The late Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, gave me the same impression; it’s tragic that his career was only a fraction of Attenborough’s long tenure. It seems fitting that Terri Irwin introduced this touching, often hilarious 2006 NTA tribute to Attenborough (Part 1; Part 2). It includes some wonderful black and white footage of the naturalist as a young man. I never even realized how much I loved Attenborough, until I watched this.
Let’s be honest: biologists sometimes get a little intoxicated by the beauty of the natural world. My friends know I will break off mid-conversation to crawl into the brush, mesmerized by a snake or a liverwort. My good china is full of dead insects, and my freezer is packed with unlucky birds. I collect things. To be surrounded by those wonders on a daily basis, to unpack and unravel and discover them, is to be constantly at play. Becoming a biologist is the perfect excuse to never grow up.
My favorite “biology poem,” by Atlantic Monthly poetry editor David Barber, perfectly captures that playful wonder. It’s from his latest, phenomenally diverse book, fittingly titled Wonder Cabinet. I’ve been carrying it with me all winter, and can’t recommend it highly enough. This book is a real Wonder Cabinet.
Pam at Phantasmaphile recently noted the unfortunate proliferation of self-declared “Wonder Cabinets” that are basically random juxtapositions of objects. The original wonder cabinets (or wunderkammeren, or cabinets of curiosities), were somewhat haphazard - they predated modern scientific taxonomies, freely mixing natural specimens with artificial objects of interest; their contents reflected the eccentric tastes of individual collectors. But above all, a wonder cabinet was the world in microcosm: what Francis Bacon described as “a small compass, a model of the universe made private.” They weren’t just accumulated stuff; they were windows into unprecedented geographic and scientific vistas. Today, it’s difficult to imagine the awe an authentic wonder cabinet must have evoked. Many scientists disapproved of wunderkammer fever: according to Descartes, “What we commonly call being astonished is an excess of wonder that can never be otherwise than bad.”
Descartes, for all his contributions to neuroscience, was clearly not my kind of biologist. Biology is all about excess - often quite messy excess. Wonder cabinets were just loosely edited selections from the excessive complexity of Nature. Furthermore, a cabinet provoked novel connections between collected artifacts and the remembered artifacts of the viewer’s experience. Within a wonder cabinet, there’s no single, prescribed path of analysis, but an excess of intuitive possibilities. It’s a cabinet of curiosity, a cabinet of questions, not answers. And that’s also very close to my personal definition of a successful poem.
To make sense of the unfamiliar, the astonishing, the messy, we resort to history and language; definitions and names; systems of organizing and explaining the evidence before us. In Wonder Cabinet, David Barber considers all of these things: excess of wonder (”Thumbnail Sketch of the Tulipmania”), the personal wonder that moves the scientist (”Ode to William Wells”), wonderful names (”Chimerical”, “Aphrodite’s Mousetrap”). It’s a pleasure to see my own inarticulate instincts about the delight and wonder of biology expressed so well. It would be a guilty pleasure, if it weren’t such good poetry.
The fin is the finest thing of its kind.
The wing’s a wonder the world over.
The tongue is a form of eternal flame.
The stone’s a story that never grows old.
O fin, it’s certain you want for nothing.
Yo wing, you’re everything we’ve ever dreamed.
You said it, tongue: of arms and men you sing.
Here’s looking at you, stone: a star is born.
Who doesn’t burn for a soul on the wing?
Where is the man that can fine-tune the fin?
When shall we learn to read the mind of the stone?
What in the world holds its own like the tongue?
Stone says fin’s the one that schooled the wing.
Story goes one singer could charm the stones.
Rock, paper, scissors; worlds without end.
One slip of the tongue makes the whole world kin.
All together now: the many in the one.
Brush fire of fins stirring the fathoms,
Cairns of lost tongues, the chorus in the wings
Riffing on the omens of the heavens.
Soul knows it can’t live on breath alone.
When the tongue wags the dog, the fur’s gonna fly.
The stone is a kind of recording angel.
The wing’s got the beat. The fin makes waves.
Wing it, mother tongue: the world’s your whetstone.
We’re wired for sound. We’re unfinished business.
Let’s hear it for the phoenix, all fired up.
Sirens, rock us to sleep with the fishes.
Let’s hear it for descent with variations.
Let him without fin go back to the grindstone.
The bat is the manta ray’s soul brother.
The dolphin’s glossolalia speaks volumes.
Hosannas for sea changes, the wish made flesh.
As the silkworm turns, as the chrysalis
Is my witness, leviathan’s no fluke.
Blood from a stone is a thing to behold.
Blow me down with a feather, fishers of men;
Rock of ages, take me under your wing.
Muse, make it new: leave no tongue untuned.
Rock my world, winged gods: begin again.
Atlantic Monthly interview with David Barber (if you are a subscriber, this poem is available as an audio file on their site)
Jessica Joslin’s work is exactly what this blog is about: straddling the awkward rift between biological specimen and art object, and doing so with grace and charm. Her sculptures are chimeras of real and simulated bone, metal, found objects, and wistful glass eyes.
While each piece she employs in her eerie animal reliquary is delicately beautiful, it is also the detritus of human engineering and design: old brass buttons and gold braid, glass beads, clockwork cogs and velvet ribbon. Such items are reminiscent of the whimsical technology of a century past, one’s grandparents’ house, the dark interiors of old fashioned movie theatres - and as such they have an intriguing, wistful quality. In other words, Joslin collects the things that all of us secretly want to, the shiny pieces that we might comb through, handle and admire, but ultimately force ourselves to put down; what would we do with such things?
I love that in Joslin’s pieces, bone - the most enduring part of an animal - seems like the ephemeral, fragile component, snugly caged in traceries of metal. It’s as if, in some steampunk future, the souvenirs of our biological heritage have been lovingly preserved and gradually repaired Tin Man-style, until the metal patches become the bulk of the beast.
This essay has been reposted at the new bioephemera, Feb 19, 08.
Anatomical Teaching Model of a Pregnant Woman
Stephan Zick, 1639-1715
Wood and ivory
Kunstkammer Georg Laue is a Munich antique/art gallery informed by the sensibility of the “wonder cabinets” (kunst- or wunder-kammer) of 17th century Germany. One of the interesting objects described on the site is this ivory model of a pregnant woman with removable parts, including internal organs and a fetus.
Such dissection models may seem incongruous to modern eyes - the perfectly clean, white ivory cadaver not only has impeccably coiffed hair, a hinged arm allows her hand to rest delicately against her forehead as she reclines on a small lace-trimmed pillow! She’s clearly dead, with a little inlaid coffin for a case, but she’s more like a puzzle box than a body.
17th-18th century medical illustrations offered a variety of odd perspectives on the pregnant female form. A more clinical approach prevailed in Jan van Rymsdyk’s 18th-century illustrations for atlases by William Smellie and William Hunter. (Please be aware that if you’re not of a medical bent, you may find the illustrations below the fold unpleasant.)
Rymsdyk’s illustrations focus tightly on the gravid uterus, to the exclusion of nonessential anatomy; the cadaver’s thighs are not merely truncated, they are presented in sharply detailed cross-section, like joints of meat in a butcher’s stall.
Gravid uterus at full term
Engraving, after drawings by Jan van Rymsdyk
From The anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures,
by William Hunter (1774)
It would be hard to arrange a more unsentimental view of the womb! Yet Rymsdyk’s glistening engravings are stylized in their own way - they’re hyperrealistic, impeccably clean, free of the gore that would obscure both dissection and birth. Rymsdyk’s motive is clarity rather than sentimentality, but his illustrations end up as starkly artificial as a bleached lace pillow.
In soft, semi-translucent colored wax, artists achieved more realistic results. Some of the best examples are Clemente Susini’s wax anatomical models, made between 1803 and 1805, which are documented in detail at the website of the University of Cagliari. The Cagliari collection includes two obstetrical models very similar to Rymsdyk’s engravings. (Wax models served as realistic, life-size teaching examples when pregnant cadavers were unavailable, and were still created as recently as the 1940s).
Susini also sculpted waxes more reminiscent of Zick’s style than Rymsdyk’s. His “Medical Venus” in the collection of La Specola at the University of Florence (Museo di storia naturale) represents a popular type of model displayed for the edification of 18th century audiences. Unlike the Cagliari models, or indeed other models in the La Specola collection, the most dramatic La Specola waxes depict entire nude bodies. The “dissection” is restricted to the trunk, which can be un-lidded to reveal removeable organs. Like Zick’s ivory doll, Susini’s attractive Venus reclines against a white cloth, her hair curled. When the “lid” is closed, a string of pearls even adorns her neck.
Reclining female figure (”Medical Venus”)
Clemente Susini, late 18th century
wax
La Specola, University of Florence
But unlike Zick’s ivory model, the Venus does not appear to be dead. Her eyes are open and her head is tilted in an attitude that has been variously described as drugged, ecstatic, resigned, or aroused. Other waxes at La Specola display similar expressions (see below). Although we find this apparent vivisection grotesque, the stuff of horror films, the 19th-century audience were probably more comfortable with such a surreal portrayal than they would have been with clinical realism. Reclining, drowsy nudes were common artistic subjects, and by giving his female nudes a classical, theatrical flourish, Susini may have been sidestepping the anxiety and taboos associated with dissection and violation of a corpse.
Reclining female figure
Clemente Susini, late 18th century
wax
La Specola, University of Florence
A ceramic torso by Manfredini also selects a surreal mode of presentation. Manfredini’s subject actually holds the folds of her own dissected abdomen open, as the layers of her dermis drape and mingle visually with the cloth of her robe. Her face gazes upward thoughtfully, and her attitude seems to be calm, solicitous desire to help the viewer examine her viscera (including uterus, intestines, and two very accurate oviducts). One can almost imagine her tilting her pelvis to afford a better angle to the onlooker!
Female bust with open abdomen
Giovan-Battista Manfredini, 1773-76
terra cotta
These examples are part of a long tradition of placing anatomical specimens in “normal” social contexts; skeletons and partially flayed men are frequently depicted walking, posing, and conversing in illustration and sculpture. But male specimens were usually exhaustively dissected, which had a dehumanizing effect. Susini’s skinless, hairless male waxes at La Specola do not appear nearly as “alive” to us as his females, who served to demonstrate the few organs unique to their gender, and remained otherwise attractive and whole.
18th century obstetrical models represent women simultaneously as ideals of graceful femininity and as puzzle boxes of removable parts. The modern viewer may well find them bizarre; the detailed portrayal of their hair and jewelry seems irrelevant, incongruous, or macabre, and the overtones of vivisection are disturbing. In the words of my anatomy students, Rymsdyk’s unsentimental approach to anatomy is “gross” (literally), but Susini’s Medical Venus is “twisted.” Annette Burfoot, in a thought-provoking article that conveys the experience of visiting La Specola, calls the collection “a visual feast of gore and the erotic” and argues that the waxes are the earliest “‘cinematic’ representations of the body as liminal subject between fear and rationality—key components of the horror genre.”
As a society, we become uneasy whenever medical knowledge is taken out of a sterile, dehumanized context. Two recent traveling shows, “Body Worlds” and “Bodies: The Exhibition,” which use actual, plastinated cadavers in a variety of poses, have been predictably plagued by controversy. Bodies:The Exhibition has special problems with the provenance of its Chinese cadavers, but both shows have been criticized for turning anatomy into theatre, or treating human bodies as artistic raw material, to be posed and composed for dramatic effect. Body Worlds reportedly makes a special effort to avoid offending visitors with its one obstetric exhibit (a third-trimester female who voluntarily donated her body for this purpose) by moving it away from the rest, behind a curtain. Entertainment, education, or exploitation? One thing’s certain: anatomy and art remain awkward partners.
A Case of Curiosities is a site to explore - if, like me, you find preserved specimens fascinating, not gross. (A cabinet of curiosities is one of my favorite things). The site includes original artwork, the artist’s collection of vintage taxidermy ephemera, examples of restored Victorian taxidermy, and lots of intriguing trivia. I even learned a new biological term:
lu’ sus na • tu’ ræ [L.] A sport (frisk, caprice) or freak of nature.
This winged cat is an especially marvellous frisk, isn’t it?
Finally, Anna and Rob, whomever you are, you absolutely rock for having taxidermic art on your gift registry. I am in genuine awe.
