Scholarly Article Quote of the Day

"a customer at Seba’s sale purchased a lot that contained a “piece of a penis, artfully prepared” by Ruysch, a preparation of intestines, a book, and amole skeleton for the sum of 23 guilders. In 1713, Bidloo’s “most charming mole skeleton” was sold for 4 guilders 10 stuivers. Human intestines “decorated with wax and mercury and a corium humanum” were also available for 1 guilder 10stuivers. A “penis siccatus” fetched 1 guilder and 2 stuivers together with “two testicles injected with mercury.” As part of a separate lot, several “penes viriles etcanini” were purchased for 14 stuivers, even though a dog’s baculum was also added. Adding together Bidloo’s mole skeleton, intestines and penis, the totalamount is 7 guilders 2 stuivers, and it also includes an extra corium humanum and the two testicles. Discounting the additional book on Seba’s sale, Ruysch’sspecimens were still worth three times as much as Bidloo’s."

From A Museum of Wonders or a Cemetery of Corpses? The Commercial Exchange of Anatomical Collections in the Early Modern Netherlands by Daniel Margocsy in Silent Messengers, 2011

Scholarly Quote of the Day

Joachim Wtewael, Perseus and Andromeda, 1611, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris

"Andromeda's feet are directed toward the observer, one of them poised beside a skull teething a thigh bone, the other lightly placed on a shell whose vibrant, seductive interior provides a startlingly direct route of entry into the figure, as if her concealed genitalia have been exposed in their displacement." -- from Joanna Woodall's article in Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality

Real Academic Quote of the Day

"A pretzel and ear are, once their differences in size have been eliminated by turning them into images, an almost exact match. A nose and popcorn, however, is a pairing which one might perhaps be forgiven for seeing as a little bit more Freudian. For one thing the principle of contiguity comes into play, in that the nose is near the mouth. It may be that what got Baldessari to use the combination was an olfactory association. I've seen him prepare popcorn (which is good for you) and eat it while watching television lots of times. I've never seen him eat a pizza (which is not) in my life. Which might mean that he is genuinely aroused by the smell of hot popcorn, and has an experiential relationship to the one but a merely visual use for the other. But it will not have escaped his attention either that on its way to the mouth the popcorn passes near to the nose, and that it is small enough to actually fit into a nostril." - from Baldessari - RMS W VU: Wallpaper, Lamps, and Plants