The theater of anatomy: The anatomical preparations of Honoré Fragonard

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 63-79

  Simon, Jonathan ^a  

^a MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 47749125970     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2002.0066     Document Type: Review

References (35)

1. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), 48
2. The Körperiveiten exhibition was at the Museum of Science and Technology in Mannheim from 30 October 1997 to 1 March 1998 before moving on to Japan. Interestingly, a recent version of this exhibition in Berlin included a preparation of a man on a horse as its centerpiece. Plastination involves replacing a body's water content with a polymer resin; see "http://www. plastination.com" for more information
3. Cited in Edmund L. Andrews, "Anatomy on Display, and It's All Too Human," New York Times, 7 January 1998
4. Only one year earlier, in 1711, Desnoües had exhibited his wax figures at the Paris Académie des Sciences. See the entry under his name in E. J. Pyke, A Biographical Dictionary of Wax Modellers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)
5. Michael Lynn has captured the enthusiasm of the Parisian bourgeoisie for the sciences in his lively description of the Musée de Monsieur in "Enlightenment in the Public Sphere: The Musée de Monsieur and Scientific Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Paris," Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999): 463-76
6. Jean-Joseph Sue, Abrégé de l'anatomie du corps de l'homme (Paris: Simon fils, 1748), 2-3. "En disséquant, on fouille dans les entrailles même de la Nature qui nous devient un livre, & les impressions qui nous en restent sont infiniment plus sensibles que celles qui sont acquises par les autres études. L'objet de l'Anatomie est l'Homme vivant. Son sujet est le Cadavre humain, ou celui des Brutes. Comme tous ceux qui s'adonnent à cette science, ne tendent pas tous à la même fin on conçoit aisément qu'elle ne se borne pas aux personnes de l'Art. Elle convient aux Physiciens, aux Théologiens, aux Jurisconsultes, & presqu'à tous ceux qui sont de quelque profession libérale ou mécanique."
7. In a recent book on Renaissance anatomy, Roger French has explored this "know thyself" tradition in dissection, which was adopted as the central theme for a recent exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery. See Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 1999)
8. and Martin Kemp and Marina Wallis, eds. Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000)
9. Londa Schiebinger, "Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy," in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987)
10. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990)
11. and Ludmilla Jordanova, "Gender, Generation and Science: William Hunter's Obstetrical Atlas," in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), to cite but three examples from the history of medicine
12. Perhaps the best recent work to come out on these wax models is Michel Lemire, Artistes et mortels (Paris: Chabaud, 1990), which also includes a section on the work of Fragonard
13. See also Michel Lemire, "Representation of the Human Body: The Colored Wax Anatomic Models of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in the Revival of Medical Instruction," Surgical and Radiologic Anatomy 14, no. 4 (1992): 283-91
14. See, for example, Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), in particular chap. 9, "Changes in Attitude toward Relations between the Sexes."
15. Of course, there are deep historiographical problems associated with how we should "look" at historical artifacts and how we might think about eighteenth-century audiences looking at them. Ludmilla Jordanova offers a valuable discussion of this problem in the introduction to her Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989)
16. The most thorough treatment of this issue, although it concerns only the situation in Britain, is Ruth Richardson, Heath, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987)
17. From a report by Flandrin and Huzard submitted to the Assemblée Nationale in 1790, cited in A. Railliet and L. Moulé, Histoire de l'École d'Alfort (Paris: Asselin & Houzeau, 1908), 259, "[P]ièces fraîches d'anatomie, pièces sèches, injections, parties naturelles moulées, dessins, modèles des bandages, des instrumens, jardin botanique, tout y est rassemblé; les élèves ont ces objets constamment sous les yeux, et ils leur sont tous expliqués dans les différents cours auxquels ils ont rapport. "
18. Y. Poulle-Drieux, "Honoré Fragonard et le cabinet d'anatomie de l'École Vétérinaire d'Alfort pendant la Révolution," Revue d'histoire des sciences 15 (1962), 141-62
19. Pierre-Louis Verly, "Honoré Fragonard Anatomiste, Premier directeur de l'École d'Alfort" (diss., École Vétérinaire d'Alfort, 1963)
20. and Michel Ellenberger, L'Autre Fragonard: Son oeuvre à l'École Vétérinaire d'Alfort (Paris: Jupilles, 1981)
21. Ellenberger, L'Autre Fragonard, 14
22. The Fragonard Museum has an informative Website: http://www.vet-alfort. fr/fr/musee/ musee.htm
23. See Jean Clair, ed., L'Âme au corps: Arts et sciences, 1793-1993: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 19 octobre 1993-24 janvier 1994 (Paris: Gallimard, 1993)
24. For more on Zumbo (or Zombo) (1656-1701), see Maria Luisa Azzaroli Puccetri, Liberto Perugi, and Paolo Scarani, "Gaetano Giulio Zumbo: The Founder of Anatomic Wax Modeling," Pathology Annual 30 (1995): 269-81, and for more on Ruysch (1638-1731)
25. see Antonie M. Luy-endijk-Elshout, "Death Enlightened: A Study of Frederik Ruysch," Journal of the American Medical Association 212, no. 1 (1970): 121-5
26. William Smellie, Set of Anatomical Tables (London, 1754)
27. William Hunter, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (Birmingham, 1774)
28. Cited in Verly, "Honoré Fragonard Anatomiste," 17
29. Karl Asmund Rudolphi, Bemerkungen aus dem Gebiet der Naturgeschichte, Medicin und Thierarzneykunde auf einer Reise durch einen Theil von Deutschland, Holland und Frankreich (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1805)
30. Rudolphi, Bemerkungen, 2:45, note
31. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Éloges des académiciens (La Haye: Isaac van der Kloot, 1740)
32. In their book on the history of monsters, Daston and Park suggest that the Enlightenment saw an end to the monster being viewed as a portent or wonder of nature and the beginning of its career as exclusively an object of science. The corpse no doubt shared this trajectory to a certain extent. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998)
33. For a discussion of the grounds of such objectivity, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations 40 (1992): 81-128
34. The Visible Human Project can be found by following the links from the National Library of Medicine Website (http://www.nlm.nih.gov). Evidently, this is not a strict parallel, as the Visible Human Project consists of data taken from a body that has since been destroyed
35. For some background on the project, see José Van Dijck, "Digital Cadavers: The Visible Human Project As Anatomical Theater," Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31, no. 2 (2000): 271-85