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Event
A Brief Introduction to The Anatomical Venus: An Illustrated lecture by Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy Museum Co-Founder and author of The Anatomical Venus
Date: Tuesday, August 2
Time: 7 pm
Admission: $8
Books will be available for sale and signing
Of all the artifacts from the history of medicine, the Anatomical Venuswith its heady mixture of beauty, eroticism and deathis the most seductive. These life-sized dissectible wax women reclining on moth-eaten velvet cushionswith glass eyes, strings of pearls, and golden tiaras crowning their real human hairwere created in eighteenth-century Florence as the centerpiece of the first truly public science museum. Conceived as a means to teach human anatomy, the Venus also tacitly communicated the relationship between the human body and a divinely created cosmos; between art and science, nature and mankind. Today, she both intrigues and confounds, troubling our neat categorical divides between life and death, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, entertainment and education, kitsch and art.
Tonight, join Joanna Ebenstein--author of The Anatomical Venus and co-founder and creative director of The Morbid Anatomy Museum--for a highly illustrated talk on this fascinating creature which will situate her in her historical and cultural context while also reflecting on connections between death and wax, the tradition of life-sized simulacra and preserved beautiful women, the phenomenon of women in glass boxes in fairground displays, and ideas of the ecstatic, the sublime and the uncanny.
Image: 18th century Anatomical Venus from La Specola. Florence, Italy. Photo by Joanna Ebenstein
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LocationMorbid Anatomy Museum (View)
424 A Third Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11215
United States
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