From "Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften" of 1924

Walters Art Museum

Coitus-shaped cookies!

Prostheses

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jul/17/designs-make-us-superhuman-in-pictures#/?picture=393201585&index=0

Lady Macbeth's Period

In her article, "A Strange Infirmity," Jenijoy La Belle points out that Lady Macbeth, in preparing to murder Duncan in order to assure a certain line of kingship, asks a preternatural being to allow her menstruation to stop, assuming, psychologically, that it will make her less "feminine" and able to do the deed. Very interesting read indeed.

John Singer Sargent, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1889, Tate Gallery, London

 

Note that the dress in this picture, as it exists today with the beetle wings all over being refurbished, is included in an earlier post from last spring.

Cellini's Blood

Michael Cole's essay Cellini's Blood posits that the blood spewing from Medusa's neck in Benvenuto Cellini's mid-16th-century bronze at the Piazza della Signoria in Florence--and that dripping and coagulating from her neck--evokes coral. Coral was thought to have come either from Medusa's ichor itself or from seaweed that was petrified by her gaze and turned red from her blood. The significance is how it relates to bronze and the art of casting, looking especially at Cellini's dramatic autobiography and also enhances the value of the gift--coral being precious and acting as a periapt--being presented by Perseus to the citizens of Florence.

Science Florentine

One room of Susini's wax anatomical models at La Specola.

A model of the bicep at the Museo Galileo in Florence

One of Susini's famed Venuses

An armillary sphere by Antonio Santucci at the Museo Galileo

Early thermometers at the Museo Galileo

A sundial on the exterior of the Santa Maria Novella

"Wine for Women"

The "baby hatch" at the Ospidale degli Innocente. The grate was made just this size so that only newborns could pass through.

A wax depicting the plague at La Specola

A larger view of the "baby hatch" at the Ospidale. The building itself was designed by Brunelleschi, the architect of the famed Duomo in the heart of Florence

A wooden model of a fetus in utero at La Specola

A relic at San Lorenzo in Florence

via Morbid Anatomy

The works of Saul Chernick




Largely based on the works of Hans Baldung Grien:

Art and Love in Renaissance Italy

Phallic-Head Plate, 1536. Gubbio, Workshop of Maestro Giorgio Andreoli (?), 1536. Inscribed in reverse on banderole: OGNI HOMO ME GUARDA COME FOSSE UNA TESTA DE CAZI (Every man looks at me as if I were a dickhead)

Attributed to Desiderío da Firenze (Florentine, documented in Padua 1532–45).Satyr and Satyress, after 1524 (?) - Bronze, H. 10 5/8 in. (27 cm) - Musée National de la Renaissance, Château d'Écouen (E.CI. 2752a, b)

Music Videos

Fever Ray - If I Had a Heart

Florence and the Machine - Between Two Lungs

Bon Iver - Blood Bank

Personal Jesus

from HERE

And listen to THIS

Evolution before Darwin

Most people today are taught only the basics about the history of evolution, which ends up with us all thinking evolution=Darwin. But these ideas were floating around long before Darwin. I will give just a few examples.

In terms of how the design of living things are due to their function, look no further than Luther--not saying he's correct in his statement, but the idea is there:

“Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence. Women have narrow shoulders and broad hips. Women ought to stay at home; the way they were created indicates this, for they have broad hips and a wide fundament to sit upon.” [No. 54]"

Lucas Cranach, Martin Luther and Katarina von Bora

(note her tiny waist--a visual trope throughout Cranach's portraits of women that seems to echo Luther's statement)

But also when it comes to climate, it was known in ancient times that environment could affect general physiological or anatomical differences, an explanation for the Eastern folks with deformed heads or the bandy-legged Ethiopians described by Hippocrates.

Closer to his own time, folks like Lamarck were putting forth evolutionary theories. And his most closely resemble what we know think of as "social Darwinism"--a phenomenon that is an extrapolation from Darwinism used to justify social inequality by creating arguments that it is part of a natural hierarchy. 

Damien Hirst's Anatomy of an Angel

Bellmeriana

Hans Bellmer. La Poupée (The Doll), detail. Paris, Editions GLM, 1936. Linocut on pink paper; 16.7 x 12.8 cm.

The Many Uses of Feminine Products

1. Douse tampons with hydrogen peroxide or bleach to spot-clean clothing stains
2. Use maxi pads to absorb spills on the carpet
3. Allow children to use maxis as stickers--they will stick on anything and come off clean!
4. Collages
5. Use tampons as makeshift "growing sponge" toys by using rubber bands to form shapes and figures
6. Soak in ketchup and put on misogynist's car antenna
7. Use in science experiments!
8. Trickery:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly2nzzMRrM1r3zbhjo1_500.jpg http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly2n0tuwsc1qcgly2o1_500.jpg
9. Nosebleeds

I'll show you yours if...

Mernatomy

Could use some improvement on the, you know, amphibious apparati, but whatever. Everyone wonders...

More Artsy X-Rays

X-Ray images of sculpture

(Zwillingsbilder. Röntgenfotografien von Skulpturen)

German Renaissance Poop

Also on http://wtfarthistory.com/post/17211904482/the-scatological-human-sundial

WCW on whales

An excerpt from Some Simple Measures in the American Idiom and the Variable Foot:

II: HISTOLOGY

There is

the

microscopic

anatomy

of

the whale

this is

reassuring

Whale, American Museum of Natural History, New York

Brueghel, Bowie, and William Carlos Williams

Man who fell to Earth- Icarus Descending

www.youtube.com

The clips are from the film The man who fell to Earth. The song is from The man who fell to Earth musical

David Bowie wrote this for the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth. In it, he opens a book of poetry with Brueghel's Fall of Icarus illustrated. I would like to think it's a version of WCW's poems:

See the poem here:
http://wcwbrueghelpoetry.blogspot.com/2007/05/landscape-with-fall-of-icarus.html

Tags

Family Treasures 2

My grandmother's chopsticks, Japan, c. 1950s?

Family Treasures

All I know about this object is that it is from South America. It seems to be ceramic, has a small hole in the top, and rattles.

Real Live Academic Quote of the Day 4/15/12

"The two great ages of geographical discovery through the voyages of the early 1500s and through Alexander's conquests correspond to two great ages of anatomical discovery. These are also the two most inventive ages of erotic art in the West, for happy discoveries inspire a hopeful curiosity about everything."

Mayor, Artists and Anatomists, 1984

Bodies in the Blogosphere

I've seen most of this stuff before, but nice to have it in one place (even if not attributed):

http://marinni.livejournal.com/258692.html?thread=1060740

Witches Embraced in Art History

Hans Baldung Grien, New Year’s Wish with Three Witches, 1514

I first saw this image [in print] in Koerner's The Moment of Self-Portraiture of German Renaissance Art (1993). There, he used it as part of a larger argument that the self was ingrained in art, and that the viewer became the subject in that he/she had to contend with their own thoughts on the artwork at hand.

Claudia Swan used witchcraft as a way to show the imagination of, mostly, Jacques de Gheyn II in Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629). (She also has a wonderful academic fascination with both blowfish and scientific representation).

And this filters (anachronistically) into Lyndal Roper's Oedipus and the Devil, which uses testimony of women accused of witchcraft to show, through their imaginative stories, how gender is constructed and reconstructed in a social context.

The Photographer

Edweard Muybridge is quite the character. In honor of the 182nd anniversary of his birth, Google put up a Doodle that animates his famous series of pictures proving that racing horses do, in fact, lift all their legs up at once.

This is what he's best known for -- serial photography that is now thought of as essentially the predecessor to film. But it's weird that he's still famous for his photography even though he killed another man in cold blood.

Such a story inspired Philip Glass to produce an opera called The Photographer (1982).

But what always interested me (obviously) are his body studies. He made people strip nude and move in certain ways so that he could record how the body looked in motion.

Muybridge, Woman Walking Down Stairs, 1887.

And Muybridge was also [according to some] the inspiration for one of the coolest paintings ever, Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending Staircase, N0. 2, 1912.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Spring is like that, I guess

Some samples of my favorite poems:

‎"Christmas lights left up all year
thus robbed of the emotive force
of their redeployment I do not like."

-Dean Young, Don't Need a New One, Just Fix What You Got

‎"April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers."
-Edna St Vincent Millay, Spring

Curious Fungi

Oooh, fungus book.

Nipples at the Met

Really, the title says it all...

http://www.nipplesatthemet.com/

Animantium terrestrium, volatilium, et aquatilium effigies ad vivum depictae