Pyrotechnics in art

More on Picturing Pyrotechnics from The Public Domain Review

Perfumery

Firstly, an artist decided to distill her sweat and tears, quite literally, into a perfume.

I mean, there is always Das Parfum to freak us out about smells, and at least this one comes from the source.

According to Wikipedia "The word perfume is used today to describe scented mixtures and is derived from the Latin word, "per fumus", meaning through smoke."

Hungary Water was the first alcohol-based perfume, allowing us all to suffer through the sprays of torturous mist that envelope the cosmetics counters at malls and other places. 

Sachets and pomanders were used prior to this.

A pomander on the end of a rosary bead

Christianatomy

I have seen quite a few interesting phenomena whereby religious figures are depicted bodily. We have the often seen vierge ouvrante, the Virgin Mary who opens to reveal a scene,

as well as the Maria gravida, who often has a little window to show the Christ child in her womb,

but more recently, I also found some Christ figures which show the internal anatomy:

Plastinated Placenta

Found a Great Quote from P.S: Poetry & Science:

Navena opened a through-door and took us into the present-day anatomical theatre, all stainless-steel and halogen lights. Navena herself, I should say, is a beautiful, lean and muscular lady with bottle-bright red hair, who falls into that age group of ‘I have no idea how old she is’ (30s, I’d guess,) with a charming little gap between her front teeth and colourful tattoo on her left bicep. She’s a mixture of shy and sweet and ‘don’t mess with this woman, she could take you down and stuff you’. I asked her how she began making wax models, and she said she learned from an old woman – not many people know the craft now. When we leaned over a plastinated placenta on one of the dissecting tables and asked if it was real, she chirped, ‘Yes – it’s mine!’

AND A PICTURE:

The Deadliest of Fashions

HERE is why you should do research before taking on new trends. From the toxic to the combustible, it's probably good that companies do testing before marketing (most) new products. But not on animals! (Or orphans...)

Courtesy of David Mamet

If that doesn't scare you enough, this might:

Your waist on corsets

Your foot on high heels

Thanks AW!

Biting Lady Bits and Other Craziness

Seven Most Ridiculous Myths About the Female Body by Jezebel


And HERE more on the history of the vagina dentata

Felicien Rops

And his 19th-century Belgian erotica:

THIS: http://www.valleypressuk.com/authors/kelleyswain/

Book Wheels

Anatomy Riots

"The New York Doctors Riot was just one in a stream of so-called “anatomy riots” that plagued the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. Medical historian Michael Sappol has counted at least 17 such incidents between 1765 and 1854, in New Haven, Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia. These riots were sparked by anger over dissections and grave-robbing, which was how most schools got their bodies, since there was no legal supply. People saw grave-robbing as an affront to the honor of the dead and the sacred nature of graveyards, and dissection frightened many Christians who believed that only complete bodies could be resurrected. Dissection also had a veneer of criminality: in England, the only legal source of bodies was executed criminals, and many saw anatomical dissection as an extra layer of punishment suitable only for the wicked."

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gory-new-york-city-riot-shaped-american-medicine-180951766/#btLQ9RYdJT5MlsmF.99

Words to Offend

The first instance of the word "fuck":

Excerpts from Salon's Modern History of Swearing:

Other wonderful words that may be unfamiliar to you include godemiche, another French import, meaning “dildo.” A dildo,  Grose  [In his 1785 “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue”] helpfully explains, is “an implement resembling the virile member, for which it is said to be substituted, by nuns, boarding school misses, and others obliged to celibacy, or fearful of pregnancy. Dildoes are made of wax, horn, leather, and diverse other substances, and if fame does not lie more than usually, are to be had at many of our great toy shops and nick nackatories.” Grose is wonderfully able to describe what a dildo is while denying any firsthand knowledge of them. Lobcock is “a large relaxed penis, also a dull inanimate fellow.” A rantallion is “one whose scrotum is so relaxed as to be longer than his penis, i.e. whose shot pouch is longer than the barrel of his piece.” Fartleberries are “excrement hanging to the hairs about the anus, &c, of a man or woman.” (Here &c, “et cetera,” is back to being slang for the private parts.) And then there is burning shame, “a lighted candle stuck into the parts of a woman, certainly not intended by nature for a candlestick.” Why this lascivious practice bears mention when larking and huffling don’t is not completely clear. Grose defines cunt as “a nasty name for a nasty thing”; perhaps he was simply unable to deny himself the pleasure of the pun: burning shame is “terrible shame/shame (cunt) on fire.”

And to this I add a little poem all about dildos: The Dildoides by Samuel Butler, 1672.

Galileo's Finger

More on it HERE

Masturbating Animals for Research

According to Salon, Human-on-dolphin sex is not really that weird

Another One Bites the Dust, After He Reads It

I highly recommend reading the obituary of George J. Armelagos who, admittedly, I had not heard of until his obituary was published. But obituaries are always surprisingly interesting, revealing things that you may have missed years or decades earlier. I had the same phenomenon with Clyde Snow's obituary earlier this year.

Both were anthropologists, reading and deciphering history from bones. Great stuff, right?

And a few excerpts:

"Based on their examination of New World skeletons that displayed the bone scarring characteristic of syphilitic infection, they concluded that a progenitor of the syphilis bacterium was already present in pre-Columbian America, where it was manifest as the skin disease yaws."

...

"Still other findings are anachronistically astonishing, like the discovery by Professor Armelagos and associates of traces of the antibiotic tetracycline in 1,400-year-old Nubian skeletons from what is now Sudan. The drug was not introduced commercially until the 1940s.

"The Nubians were master brewers, and the tetracycline — born of a bacterium found in soil — was a spontaneous byproduct of their beer-making process, the researchers concluded."

...

"He remains best known to a general readership for “Consuming Passions,” which chronicled, among other things, the use throughout history of a spate of curious ingredients — including potatoes and hippopotamus snouts — thought to be endowed with aphrodisiac powers.

"In Elizabethan times, the book reveals, prunes were considered aphrodisiacs. Visitors to brothels of the period, Professor Armelagos took delight in disclosing in interviews, received a free prune with every purchase."

Getting Dowded

So, Maureen Dowd has become a point of not so much contention as much as fodder for satire. It began with her really not-so-innocent post where she reveals the harrowing effects of marijuana on her personally. With her usual lack of subtlety (she wouldn't have a job if she had any), she essentially quashes the idea that pot should be sold in such an appealing manner as, say, her delectable chocolate bar.

What happens next...

The New Yorker creates their own take on what Dowd might have done after the main show.

Salon gives a short review and excerpt:

What could go wrong with a paragraph or two?

Everything, as it turned out.

Just kidding. Maureen Dowd’s column did not send me into a hallucinatory state for 8 hours and leave me questioning whether or not I was dead. She just wrote a kind of confusing editorial that used a really long anecdote about her experience of being too high on pot chocolate as a way to make a point about the apparent dangers of legal pot in Colorado.

Here’s her retelling of what sounds like a pretty unpleasant experience taking drugs and rubbing her corduroy pants:

But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

Oh dear.

The Guardian imagines a scenario where other NYT columnists take various drugs and their responses. Gawker asks readers to match drugs with NYT columnists. Some more hilarious responses can be found through the BBC.

Newfound Treasures

Diseases America Forgot

It all starts with this article: Where are they now? Diseases That Killed You In Oregon Trail. In its adolescence, America's population was constantly struggling with viral and bacterial plagues that are now largely under control in the US due to vaccinations and antibiotics. (That's right, anti-vaccine celebrities).

Along with the near-eradication of these diseases, we can also see how the places that once treated the sick were abandoned to the wilderness. North Brother Island is one such place, eerily close to the Bronx. It was a home to lepers as well as the famous Typhoid Mary. Recently, Ian Ference decided to photograph its remains.

Slowly, some of these areas are being reused, such as the site of the White Haven Sanitorium, which was once used to quarantine and treat consumptives (i.e. tuberculosis patients) and is now the Powerhouse Eatery.

But if you're just into abandoned hospitals, look only slightly further than a Google search.

Nurturing a Mimetic Vocabulary

Once upon a time, a friend and I would stay up late at the diner, drinking coffee, writing, and reading. Once we decided to find new words to use, looking through the dictionary until we found something interesting. My favorite find was "vermicular"--wormlike. I haven't used it much since, but I realized how functional and colorful descriptive words can be--especially in art history where mimesis is a key component preceding any argument.

The article 18 Fancy Words for Specific Shapes is a fantastic list of largely scientific words that can easily transcend their disciplinary confines.

"Kidney beans may be reniform, but actual kidneys are fabiform."

Action verbs provide another level of interest. Poetry and literature, of course, provide a parallel universe where nouns have been verbed since at least James Joyce. Billy Collins does not write that the dog jumps through the snow--he "porpoise[s]" through it.

Victorian and 20th-Century Medical Men

Many of the collections where I do research were owned by single collectors--men that generally had a background in medicine that blossomed into an obsession with medical objects and their histories. These include Sir Henry Wellcome (Wellcome Collection, London), Josiah C. Trent (Trent Collection, Duke University), Howard Dittrick (Dittrick Museum), Arno B. Luckhardt, LeRoy Crummer, and various people that connected them: the booksellers Henry and Ida Schuman, physician Harvey Cushing, etc. etc.

Howard Dittrick, whose museum has three manikins, was originally awed by Henry Wellcome's Collection--which had dozens of ivory manikins bought before his death in 1936--and in an obituary he wrote for Josiah Trent he makes sure to mention that "[Trent] was particularly proud of a group of 15 ivory manikins of rare beauty.*

*Bulletin of the History of Medicine23 (Jan 1, 1949): 95.

Know Thyself, In Your Likeness

A post by Morbid Anatomy that links Frederik Ruysch--the master of dead baby tableaux--to a later publication by a little-known German medical man and historian, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer.

Vernacular Literature Meets Anatomy

The New York Academy of Medicine has compiled some interesting blog posts, including one on a compilation of anatomical limericks and one children's book teaching morals through sickness.

Bone Architecture and Book Review

Ossuaries, charnel houses, catacombs--whatever they are called, they are part of a major phenomenon whereby bones were used to create and decorate spaces. They were memorials, spiritual spaces, and warnings wrapped into one. A great article in VICE discusses the specific site of Kutná Hora. A few quotes:

"The hundreds of thousands of human bones have been arranged in all kinds of creative ways, from bone chalices and chandeliers to strings of skulls and bones hung across the ceiling like history’s most depressing party bunting. It’s the Ted Bundy approach to interior design: the entrance to Disneyland’s Nightmare Before Christmas ride if they’d sourced their raw materials from a morgue rather than a Hollywood prop department." 

"the aristocratic Schwarzenberg family, who owned the church at the time, asked a woodcarver to do something with the forgotten bones, and what you see today is what he came up with. František Rint worked for decades to organize and style the remains into decorations, recruiting his wife and kids to help him in perhaps the least family-friendly family business I’ve ever come across."

For a much broader scope, there is Paul Koudounaris's The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011). Koudounaris is perhaps best known for his appearance on the Discovery Channel’s Oddities television series as a quirky gothic collector, but his true work is laid out in The Empire of Death. It is never an easy task for a scholar—the author is an art history Ph.D.—to transform rigorous research into a readable monograph, but here the objects are just curious enough, and the stories behind them written specifically to lead the reader through the adventures of a scholar into the deep, dark works of charnel houses without devolving into lecturedom.

Before diving into the book’s content, I should add that the quality of its design does nothing but add interest to the volume by imbuing the stamped black cover with dramatic imagery, a gothic fashion sense, and details such as burgundy binding cloth and book marker. The endsheets feature what seem to be maps redesigned to emphasize other design elements within and without and also show the far-flung reaches where these houses of bones lie. Freckled with sepia figures and nostalgically-tinged typography interrupted only by giant beautifully photographed plates, this book was made to be fetishized, much like the bones are treated in the text. Nonetheless, Koudounaris also has a website for all of his photographs as well. 

Koudounaris begins with a simple anecdote, but reading like a novel, “An American woman, a tourist, had descended into the crypt underneath the Capuchin monastery of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome.” By the end of the next page he has already cited two theorists, but in such a way as to just break the tip of how the reader’s understanding of death and its treatment must be expanded to read further. Through two hundred, albeit highly illustrated and wide-margined, pages of text, the author holds our hands and leads us from one location to another, never dwelling in one place too long, but using the individual spaces to speak visually and through his intellectual interpretation and the stories he has gathered. He also makes it very clear that death has not always forced sadness and fear, also hope, piousness, and respect for the ancestral past on people throughout history. The stories are both enlightening and entertaining, but the catalogue of sites, maps, and informative captions relevant to either research or far flung travels for the curious and macabre.

Brief Statement Regarding Penny Dreadful

There is a new show by Showtime called Penny Dreadful. The name comes from cheap, sensational novels. The show is dramatic enough to earn the name, but has a great deal of historical and literary references to pique the interest of historians of science and medicine.

 Within the first episode, resurrection men, vampires, egyptologists, tarot readers, and Victor Frankenstein and his empathy-worthy recreation appear. Justice is done to all in some sense: The resurrection men are working in squalid and secretive conditions, the major vampires are very much like their early literary counterparts, the Egyptian scholar is set at the British Museum (fairly enough), and Mr. Frankenstein names his lovely little project "Adam" as a sort of nod to Mary Shelley's so-called monster who was obliquely, and of his own accord, given that title. 

Viewers will also get to see characters from The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula imbedded into the plot. I only wonder how many historians were on the budget...

Renaissance Depilatory Practices

One of the most memorable stories in art history is about John Ruskin's plea for an annulment. The art historian said his marriage was never consummated because he had seen so many classical and renaissance sculptures of women that he was horrified to see his wife naked--he was shocked and disgusted by her pubic hair. This begs the question did women of antiquity and the Renaissance remove their hair? Recently, there was a talk given at the Renaissance Society of America conference on this topic. Now, there is also an article in the Smithsonian Magazine using the speaker, Jill Burke's, research.

A quote:

Boil together a solution of one pint of arsenic and eighth of a pint of quicklime. Go to a baths or a hot room and smear medicine over the area to be depilated. When the skin feels hot, wash quickly with hot water so the flesh doesn’t come off.

The Man Who Read Stories From Bones

From the New York Times:

With ghoulish geniality, Clyde Snow liked to say that bones made good witnesses, never lying, never forgetting, and that a skeleton, no matter how old, could sketch the tale of a human life, revealing how it had been lived, how long it had lasted, what traumas it had endured and especially how it had ended.
...
“Bones can be puzzles,” he told The New York Times in 1991, “but they never lie, and they don’t smell bad.”
...
“Witnesses may forget throughout the years, but the dead, those skeletons, they don’t forget,” he told The Times in 2002. “Their testimony is silent, but it is also very eloquent.”

No doubt he was an inspiration to Kathy Reichs, who is a forensic anthropologist and the novelist who wrote the books on which the TV show Bones is based on.

And for a Dolly Parton song to go with it: 

Wine Design

From Designboom 

From Uncommonstudio

From HERE

The Known Knowns and Known Unknowns of Animal Sex

The latest reportage on comparative genitalia studies:

From duck vaginas to bumblebee sex: The amazing, overlooked science of genitals

Inscribed Human Skulls

So this all started with a beautiful office object found on the Colossal Shop's page. Turns out, there's a cheaper option on Etsy, even though I like the idea of a coral-colored skull better:

From here, I recall the myriad skulls I have seen with writing on them. Skulls on their own become separated from the individual that owned it, looking to non-anthropologists and biologists as just another skull. So why not write a caption right on there?

Descartes' skull was inscribed with a poem about the great brain that lived inside it (yeah, I know, body/mind duality. But Descartes also thought that the two might come together in the pineal gland, so the physical body was important to him as well). 

Musée de l'homme, Paris

Other brains were not drawn upon as odes, but as didactic or research models, like this poor soul's noggin used as a phrenology model:

Semmelweis Museum, Budapest

And sometimes, it's just for identification:

Mütter Museum, Philadelphia

*more info can be found by clicking on the pictures

Medieval Medicine and Popular Culture

First of all, THIS VIDEO starring Steve Martin as Theodoric of York. And we all know the Bring Out Your Dead scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

But then there's Phone Call to the Fourteenth Century.

And this Leech Collector.

And then, for a lack of knowledge regarding popular culture, here's some medieval torture.

I *HEART* YOU

It's hard to tell the proportion of adorable to disgusting when it comes to some pictures. Point and case:

from Discarding Images

Whales, out of their natural context

In light of the recent beached whale set to explode, memories of the 1970 planned explosion of a beached whale that, somewhat comically but also tragically, didn't work out so well, and the extra-gross whale that exploded when it was being cut open, I started thinking about other beached whales I had come across in prints and texts.

Jan Saenredam, Stranded Whale, 1602

One website provides the translation of the text:

“A large whale, thrown up out of the blue sea (gods, let it not be a bad omen!), washed up on the beach near Katwijk.  What a terror of the deep Ocean is a whale, when it is driven by the wind and its own power on to the shore of the land and lies captive on the dry sand.  We commit this creature to paper and we make it famous, so that the people can talk it about it.”

They were always considered omens, in this case one that coincided with a Spanish attack on the Netherlands.

I also came across this print, from a wildly different context:

Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai-Sanur, Indonesia, 1970s

And here's a whole slew of British ones.

Recently Slate had a story on how the great Blue Whale was suspended from the ceiling of the Natural History Museum in New York.

A second famous whale in the museum is shown fighting with a giant squid for its life. If you haven't seen either in person, the movie The Squid and the Whale does a good job of conveying the nostalgic feeling many have for them.

Presidential Dentures

NY Times story on Washington's dentures

An Art Historical Tour of Absinthe

On a trip to the Netherlands, I bought a tiny bottle of absinthe. My roommates and friends would have none of it. And honestly, I found it pretty foul. But I could no longer stand the taste of licorice after buying Dutch Drop Mentos--a compilation of mint and licorice that seems to be a regional delicacy:

Nonetheless, absinthe has always been advertised as an intoxicating and creativity-inspiring spirit due to its art historical past, especially with Van Gogh. It doesn't hurt that Poppy Z. Brite sprinkled references to it throughout her goth fiction anthology Wormwood and Nine Inch Nails featured it in their video for Perfect Drug.

Absinthe is distilled from wormwood, anise, fennel, and god knows what else. It's often green, which is why it (and/or its effects) are referred to as "the green fairy."

But much of the mythology started with painters. Which now leads to crap like this, obviously based on his most famous self portrait and reports of his imbibing:

But Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Van Gogh, among others, depicted the beverage:

Toulouse-Lautrec

Van Gogh

Privat-Livemont

Oliva

Maignon