"A Skeleton as a Woman Warning of the Dangers of Fornication"From Wellcome Images; More here.
French or Spanish School, c.1680
Oil on canvas , 174 x 73 cm
You can find out more by clicking here."to honour the dead is one of the largest categories of 18th- century jewellery to survive. Many mourning jewels have inscriptions that record the name and dates of the dead person.From 1760 there was a new vogue for memorial medallions or lockets. These became especially popular in Britain, though similar work was produced throughout Europe.The lockets could be bought ready made, and the designs were standardised. Neo-classical motifs of funerary urns, plinths and obelisks joined the more traditional cherubs, angels and weeping willows. Hair was preserved as curls within the locket, or cut up and used to create designs."
Anatomical Lectures Certificate.[mss. 1785]; sheet: (23.5 x 19 cm). plate: (19 x 15 cm). Link to record.Brigham plate 48. Link to Brigham.Engraved certificate featuring a bust portrait of a bald Galen (AD 129 – 199/217) facing right surrounded by a medallion-shaped Chippendale border. Additional Chippendale bordering and two surgical skeletons flank the manuscript and engraved text in the center. Beneath the text is an anatomical scene where a man with rolled sleeves operates on a corpse on a round table; the corpse has a rope, presumably the remains of a noose, around his neck. On the table, accompanying the body are a blanket and surgical tool.
The certificate reads, both engraved and manuscript text, “These may certify that Mr Levi Bartlett has diligently attended an entire course of my Anatomical Lectures & Demonstrations; together with Physiological & Surgical observations at the dissecting Theatres in the University at Cambridge whereby he has had an opportunity of acquiring an accurate knowledge in the structure of the human body and the surgical branch of his Professions. John Warren Prof. of Anat[omy] and Surgery University Cambridge. Boston June 8th 1785.” Engraved initials in lower right “PR [Paul Revere].” On verso: Purchase information, 1951.
According to the studio biography Theda Bara (anagram of "Arab Death") was born in the Sahara to a French artiste and his Egyptian concubine and possessed supernatural powers. In fact, her father was a Cincinnati tailor. By 1908 she appeared in Broadway's "The Devil" named Theodosia de Coppett. In 1914 she met Frank Powell who cast her as The Vampire in A Fool There Was (1915), the role from which we have the word "vamp" -- a woman who saps the last sexual energies from middle-aged respectable men, no more than slaves crawling at her feet. In some of her publicity photos all that remains of her devoured victims are their skeletons before her on the floor. Most of these period parts (Salome (1918), Cleopatra (1917), Camille (1917)) were filmed from 1915 to 1919.Image from The Secret Life of Anna Blanc- mystery, murder, and romance in 1900s L.A. Thank you Eve Marie Bordoli-Brown for sending this image my way!
‘discovered’ by Stefan Knor, a lighting artist. Inspired by the powerful charisma of this seriously damaged piece of art, Stefan did not try to restore the sculpture...
... He also gave the sculpture some artistic treatment by the partial application of 24 carat gold leaf, turning it into a new contemporary piece of art. The gold is now visible alongside the black charred wood and the grey ash. It is on display with orange lighting, an essential part of this installation, which accentuates the contrast between what is charred and what is gilded. The sculpture is accompanied by an old wooden box into which visitors place their written prayers.
The Pietà has had its own death and recreation. The whole surface suffered burns and was so charred that it was replaced by a copy. Yet, since the moment that the Pietà was placed in the Cathedral on 4th April, there has been excitement and delight from those who work and volunteer here, as well as from our many visitors. It speaks of hope and light in the darkness for those who are suffering or in pain.All images my own, except the bottom, which was found, along with the quotation above, on the Canterbury Cathedral website. Visit this website to find out more.
The fully articulated human skeleton in a velvet-lined coffin chased around on each side with three panels showing the course of life, one end with attributes of the arts, the other with attributes of war, the removable cover with the journey in the footsteps of the Angel of Death, surrounded by the faces of infants alternately laughing and crying...This fantastic piece is up for sale as Lot 291 in Sotheby's "A Treasured Legacy: The Michael and Judy Steinhardt Judaica Collection"auction coming up on April 29, 2013. Who would like to purchase it for The Morbid Anatomy Library?
The Rouchomovsky Skeleton’: A Russian Gold Articulated Skeleton In Silver-Gilt SarcophagusEstimate: 150,000 - 250,000 USD
The fully articulated human skeleton in a velvet-lined coffin chased around on each side with three panels showing the course of life, one end with attributes of the arts, the other with attributes of war, the removable cover with the journey in the footsteps of the Angel of Death, surrounded by the faces of infants alternately laughing and crying.
Skeleton signed in Cyrillic, on the right splint-bone: Mozyr [18]92 Odessa [18]96 and on the left splint-bone Rouchomovsky.
Sarcophagus signed on lid: Israel Rouchomovsky and in Cyrillic on base Israel Rouchomovsky Odessa 1901.
length of skeleton 3 1/2 in., length of coffin 4 3/8 in.
9 cm; 11.2 cm
the skeleton 1892-1896, the sarcophagus 1896-1906
Israel Rouchomovsky, Mozyr and Odessa
Catalogue Note
The Skeleton
Israel Rouchomovsky (1860-1934) came from a poor family in Mozyr, Belarus. Almost three-quarters of the population of the town was Jewish, and according to some accounts his parents wanted him to become a rabbi.[i] His memoirs describe how he was drawn to silversmithing, and the efforts required to get a work permit and move with his family to Odessa, where he arrived in 1892. They also recount how he helped a colleague make a first gold skeleton, now held in the Museum of Historical Treasures of the Ukraine.[ii] He had thought this first skeleton would require a month of work, when in fact it took four, and he thought he could do even better; only certain sections of the first skeleton could move. The inscription on the leg shows that the fully articulated skeleton – supposedly with 167 different parts[iii] – required five years of work.
In his own words:"In the second piece, with the help of minute ball-bearings, all body members can move in all directions, and even the lower jaw can be opened and closed. This time I was entirely satisfied and I could say without any humbleness that I succeeded, I really succeeded, and it was at that point that I realized that this "deceased" deserved a beautiful sarcophagus."[iv]
It would be another five years to make the case, finished in Odessa in 1901. Again in Rouchomovsky's own words: "The sarcophagus is cut in massive silver and is covered entirely with ornaments and miniature figures [which he describes in minute detail]." Of the whole project, almost a decade of careful craftsmanship, the artist wrote, "although the work has taken very long, I can say that it is one of my best works, and I have always remained more than content with it, not only with its execution, but also with its underlying conception."...
In the Jesuit missions, the publication of many books included, in 1705, a translation of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg's De la Diferencia Entre lo Temporal y Eterno. Among the engravings in the book was one of a triumphant personified death, holding a sickle (a variation on the scythe) in one and and an hourglass in the other. Death as a skeleton also appears in another image, which was likewise copied from a European original.
These engravings document the presence of the Grim Reaper in the missions, but more important in folk culture were theatrical productions staged by the Jesuits for the Guaranís' religious instruction. The performances often included Christ's resurrection, with props of skulls and bones and with the Grim Reaper in the supporting cast for dramatization of Christ's triumph over death. Such performances contributed to fixing the personified image of death within a religious context.
Almost all the artists in Jesuit missions were Guaranís who were trained by Europeans. These indigenous carvers of saints thought of their work more religiously than artistically: "Image-makers quite literally believed that they were making saints and gods." This observation is particularly suggestive in the context of San La Muerte, whose traditionalal carvers were likewise creating, not representing, a supernatural power. For the Guaraní mission artists, "The reality of things was not expressed by imitating their visual appearance, as in European art, but by capturing their essence." The imagery, including the image of death personified, was adopted from European traditions and then invested with this "essence." The carvings transcend mere representation and become empowered in themselves like amulets.All of this also brings to mind the wonderful 18th century book La Portentosa Vida de la Muerte (The Astounding Life of Death); more on that here.
The trend for jewelled skeletons began in the late 16th century. The Roman catacombs, which had been abandoned as burial sites and largely forgotten about, were rediscovered in 1578 by vineyard workers. This coincided with the initial phase of the Counter-Reformation; the Council of Trent, called to formulate the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation, had just concluded, and one of the areas of concern was affirming the efficacy and belief in relics against attacks by their detract ors. Since the remains in the catacombs dated from the second to fifth centuries AD, it was possible, with a bit of wishful thinking, for Church leaders to romant icise the bones as belonging to almost any famed early Christian saint or martyr. In the newfound cache they saw a potential tool to bolster their supply of relics and promote their power.
--From "Bones with Bling: The amazing jewelled skeletons of Europe," by Paul Koudounari for The Fortean Times, June 2011Click here to read this entire article--a nice walk through the art and history of extraordinary European jewel and bone relics--on The Fortean Times website. All images sourced from the article and taken by author Paul Koudounari.
You can find out more about this wonderful book--which contains countless gems such as this--by clicking here. Thanks to my good friend Ben for introducing me to this book, which has been captivating me for the past few weeks.
"Betty Boop's Snow White" (1933) is undoubtedly Fleischer's masterpiece as lapse, particularily its final sequence in an underworld--both an Orphean journey (i.e. the myth of Orpheus), and an Orphic journey (a silly dance of death set to music.)...the evil queen turns Koko the Clown into a shapeshifting ghost, while her mirror keeps sprouting hands; and a blackface to tell her who is the fairest of them all. At the same time, Koko as ghost is rotoscoped from a clip of Cab Calloway...
Koko sings "St. James Infirmary," while turning into a twenty dollar gold piece, then into a "shot of that booze." At the same time, to illustrate the line of "crap shootin' pallbearers," the walls behind him is lined with murals of skulls and cows together, gambling. That bears scrutiny, usually requires a few viewings: it is intentionally traced like the wall of a Coney Island Mystery Cave Ride. It is also traced out of a collective imaginary (at least the collective of animators). The skulls of African Americans reenact the greasy underworld of back-alley saloon life in Harlem. But not Harlem as blacks knew it--this is Harlem as the white male Fleischer animators saw it....
--The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects, Norman Klein, 2004
Hand-carved of hardwood; these chairs were apparently modeled after a rare 18th-century chair which sold for over $100,000 at a New York auction. By oral tradition, they were part of a set custom-ordered by actor Vincent Price. However, Price died before they were delivered. In any case, they make a wonderful conversation piece! Excellent condition. Each measures 54" x 24" x 24".Text from the Heritage Auction's description for the lot; text and image Via Anonymous Works.
Imaging / Imagining the SkeletonThanks so much to friend, artist, and book-club partner Laura Splan for tipping me off to this!
Friday, April 30, 1:00-4pm
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave. (at 34th St.), NYC
Rooms 9206 / 9207
No reservations. First come, first seated
Caroline Jones KEYNOTE, MIT, History, Theory, Art History
Vincent Stefan, Lehman College CUNY, Anthropology
Lisa E. Farrington, John Jay College CUNY, Art History and Race
Mark Dery, Independent Scholar
Tatiana Garmendia, Artist
Dr. Joseph Lane, Hospital for Special Surgery, Orthopedic Surgery
Co-Sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Art History and Science & the Arts CUNY Graduate Center; Funded by the John Rewald Endowment of the Ph.D. Program in Art History
Imaging/Imagining the Skeleton is a symposium organized to explore how social conceptions of the human form have evolved alongside the increasing ability of science/medicine to represent the body. The speakers will present a constellation of inter-disciplinary discussions about the relationship between representing/exhibiting the body, evolving conceptualizations of the body and bones, and artistic and professional responses to new medical imaging technologies. The underlying proposition is that the ability to investigate and represent the body—at the levels of both anatomy and function—has exerted a profound impact on how the relationship between the physical body and human experience is conceived. Those changing conceptions, in turn, have had far-reaching consequences for the humanities, social sciences, public policy, and artistic practice.
Symposium attendees will receive a catalogue from the exhibition Visionary Anatomies, originally presented at the National Academy of Sciences.
Introductory remarks by Kevin Murphy, Professor of Art History. Panel discussion moderated by Adrienne Klein, co-Director, Science & the Arts.
Speaker Bios and Paper Topics
Professor Caroline Jones will speak on “Senses, mediation, and selves beyond the skin.” Jones explores selected art works that use the trope of the skeleton to indicate “penetrating” views of the self, but contrasts these with a recent sensory turn that suggests a broader critique of modern ocularity. Caroline Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. Previous to completing her art history degree, she worked in museum administration and exhibition curation, holding positions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1977-83) and the Harvard University Art Museums (1983-85), and completed two documentary films. In addition to these institutions, her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Hara Museum Tokyo, and the Boston University Art Gallery, among other venues. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (among others), and has been honored by fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Max Planck Institüt (2001-02), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1994-95), and the Stanford Humanities Center (1986-87). Her books include Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, (1996/98, winner of the Charles Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian Institution); Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965, (1990, awarded the silver medal from San Francisco's Commonwealth Club); and Modern Art at Harvard (1985).
Professor Vincent H. Stefan, Lehman College CUNY, will speak on “Human Skeletal Variations” as it relates to analysis of skeletal structures both prehistoric and contemporary. Dr. Stefan's field of general interest is physical anthropology with specialization in human skeletal biology. His fields of study include human osteology and skeletal biology; forensic anthropology; paleoanthropology; quantitative methods; Rapa Nui (Easter Island) skeletal biology; Polynesian skeletal biology. Current research interests include the documentation and analysis of contemporary and prehistoric human skeletal variation. Future research will focus on the use of these same procedures to assess metric cranial/skeletal variation for understanding the peopling of all of Polynesia and Oceania. Currently Professor Stefan regularly consults with the Nassau County Medical Examiner, East Meadow, NY, the Suffolk County Medical Examiner, Hauppauge, NY, and the Westchester County, Department of Laboratories & Research, Office of the Medical Examiner, Valhalla, NY in cases involving human skeletal remains. He is expert in the recovery of decomposed/ skeletonized human remains, and in the identification of victims from skeletal remains.
Professor Lisa E. Farrington will speak on “de Bouffon's 1805 published autopsy findings on the body of Sartjie Baartman” Professor Lisa E. Farrington is the founding Chair of John Jay’s Art & Music Department, as well as an accomplished curator, author, and art historian. In 2007-2008 she was awarded the prestigious William and Camille Cosby Endowed Scholars chair at Atlanta University’s historically black women’s college, Spelman. She has earned numerous academic degrees, including PhD and Master of Philosophy degrees from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, an MA in art history from American University, a BFA (magna cum laude) from Howard University, and an Honors Degree in painting and illustration from New York's School of Art & Design. Dr. Farrington worked for many years at the Museum of Modern Art and, from 1994 to 2007, was senior art historian at Parsons School of Design (the fine arts division of The New School). She specializes in Western and Non-Western Art, Haitian Art and Vodou Culture, African-American Art, Women’s Art, and Race and Gender studies. She has also taught the on-site museum art history course at Parsons Atelier in Paris, France. Dr. Farrington is a Mellon, Magnet, U.S. State Department, and Ford Foundation Fellow, and was a consultant for The College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) Art History program. She has published ten books and a dozen scholarly essays in the past decade, including two monographs on artist Faith Ringgold, and a 2005 textbook for Oxford University Press entitled Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists, which recently won three major academic literary awards, including the American Library Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing, the American Association of Black Women Historians Annual Book Award, and the Richard Wright/Zora Neale Hurston Foundation nomination for non-fiction. She recently won the Andy Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Arts Writers prize for 2010.
Mark Dery will speak on "The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen," a cultural critique of the eroticizing of the scientific gaze. Mark Dery is a cultural critic. His byline has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine to Rolling Stone to Salon to Cabinet, and his lectures have taken him to Australia to Austria, Belgium to Brazil, Macedonia to Mexico. He has been a professor in the Department of Journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. Dery is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. He is widely associated with the concept of “culture jamming,” the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,” and “Afrofuturism,” a term he coined and theorized in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future” (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). More at www.markdery.com.
Tatiana Garmendia, MFA, will speak by remote uplink on her “X-ray Painting and Graphite Series”and explore some of the dichotomies between actual and conceptual representations of body and bones. Tatiana Garmendia is a figurative artist with a conceptual twist. Her work synthesizes formal concerns and a humanist engagement with history and culture. Born in Cuba, she was raised a devotee of Santeria - the syncretic mix of Yoruba mysticism and Spanish Catholicism. She also hails from a family of doctors and medical researchers. “I grew up in a household where the human body, in various guises of dejection and exaltation, was a primary theme in devotional and medical imagery. In my earliest recollections, the body is both flesh and mythological certainty." Repatriation from the Spanish government took the artist’s family first to Madrid, and later to the U.S.A. She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and has degrees from Florida International University, and Pratt Institute of Art, Brooklyn.
Dr. Joseph Lane, MD, Professor Orthopedic Surgery and Assistant Dean, Weill Cornell Medical College and Chief Metabolic Bone Disease Hospital for Special Surgery, will speak on “Reconstructing the Skeleton.” He presents the skeleton including radiographs, bone scans, PET scans, CT scans and MRI, and will suggest some of the implications of changing methods for “reading” skeletons and bones. Joseph M. Lane, MD has published extensively on bone biology, tissue injury and repair, trauma, bone and soft tissue sarcomas (including osteogenic sarcoma and Ewing’s sarcoma), limb preservation, functional amputations, limb regeneration, and metabolic bone diseases (osteoporosis, Paget’s disease, rickets, osteomalacia, fibrous dysplasia). He has served on numerous committees for the AAOS, including the Board of Directors and Chairman of COMSS, the Chairman Oversight Panel on Women’s Health Issues. He was President of the Orthopaedic Research Society, Musculoskeletal Tumor Society, Chairman of NIH Orthopaedic Study Section, OREF grants review board, ABOS Question Writing Task Force. He is a member of the AAOS, AOA, ABJS, ASBMR, ORS, MSTS, and OTA. He has earned NIH career and R01 grants, OREF grants, and foundation awards. He has been a visiting professor at educational institutes and is on the editorial board of several peer journals.
One of the neglected masterpieces produced during Švankmajer's early career is Kostnice (The Ossuary, 1970), a "horror documentary" shot in one of his country's most unique and bleakest monuments, the Sedlec Monastery Ossuary. The Sedlec Ossuary contains the bones of some 50 to 70 thousand people buried there since the Middle Ages. Over a period of a decade, they were fashioned by the Czech artist František Rint with his wife and two children into fascinating displays of shapes and objects, including skull pyramids, crosses, a monstrance and a chandelier containing every bone of the human body. Their work was completed in 1870, and these artifacts have been placed in the crypt of the Cistercian chapel as a memento mori for the contemplation of visitors.You can watch the entire film above, or by clicking here. Click here to buy a copy of it from the Morbid Anatomy Bookstore. To see previous post on osteo-architecture, click here. To see a previous post on the art of the Brothers Quay, click here. More on the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora can be found by clicking here. Thanks, Mirloniger, for sending this along!
