“Exquisite Bodies,” at the Wellcome Collection until 18th October, is a concise, beautifully installed and fascinating show. It’s a science exhibition—to wit, anatomical models from the 18th and 19th century—but it’s an aesthetic experience as well as a scientific one. One exhibit makes that clear. It’s a poster from Hamburg dated 1913, showing the interior of an anatomical museum. Around the walls are rows and rows of anatomical models—mostly male torsos with heads and a skeleton. In the foreground are visitors, men in bowler hats, looking up or with their heads buried studiously in books. Models and skeletons alike appear to be looking at the man in the centre of the picture, who is holding aloft a heart he has plucked out of a beautiful blonde reclining female figure. The blonde is an anatomical model with removable parts. The poster is meant to be a paean to the wonders of medical science but it is also, unintentionally, a darkly surrealist fantasy about sexual violence.
In the 18th century, waxwork anatomical models proliferated across Europe as a way of studying the human body without dissecting a corpse. They were used by medical students and collected by aristocrats. The best models were made by Italian craftsmen—exemplified by two delicate dolls on show, whose abdomens can be peeled away in layers to reveal blood vessels, lungs, kidneys and, in the female figure, a foetus.
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