Private view

“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.

These were sculptures as well as scientific models. The grandest of them was a lifesize dissectible Venus, looking like a disembowelled Botticelli maiden, in the collection of the grand duke of Tuscany. Thus from the beginning, science met the idealisations of classical art in the anatomical model. Human biology had to be presented within the spectacle of aesthetic beauty.

In the 19th century, enlarged waxwork models of the human foetus were produced by craftsmen like Joseph Towne (1806-79), anatomical modelmaker at Guy’s Hospital for 53 years, and Adolf and Friedrich Ziegler, a German father and son team whose work spans the late 19th century and early 20th. There’s a photograph from the 1893 Chicago World Fair of an enormous display of Ziegler’s models of body parts, set out in rows in an elaborate cabinet. It looks exactly like one of the cabinet-based artworks by Christian Boltanski, Joseph Cornell or latterly Damien Hirst. In our times, the organisational and presentational methods of 19th-century science have become part of the aesthetics of contemporary art. Not just the vitrine, cabinet or grid of specimens, but the scale model has become a way to create art. Hirst has created cabinets in which he simply installs a selection of anatomical models and calls them art.

There are all kinds of aesthetic transformations at play in anatomical models. The soft tissues of the body have become smooth, shiny, hard surfaces, a kit that slots together like the parts of a machine. The miniaturised model body is a scientific fetish object, emblematic of the modern world’s new religion.

But the experience was not a purely scientific one. Over the course of the 19th century, anatomical models became a form of popular entertainment. Entrepreneurs set up museums, such as Benjamin Rackstrow’s on Fleet Street, which displayed models of the human reproductive system, bottled foetuses, and Egyptian mummies. Joseph Kahn established another which attracted 2,000 visitors a week at its peak. There was a mobile Belgian museum which set up in fairgrounds, and one in Barcelona’s red light district which featured models of a bearded lady and cyclops. The museums marketed themselves an educational experience that would improve people’s understanding of their bodies. But in their exhibits, science became a pornographic spectacle. The real attractions were the lurid models of human heads and sexual organs showing the effects of syphilis and other STDs—at the Wellcome, humorously displayed behind a red curtain with gold tassels, as if in a Victorian setting. Kahn’s museum had exhibits about the “dreadful effects of onanism” and he sold cures for sexual diseases. (His museum was closed down in 1873 on grounds of obscenity.)

The history of anatomical models encompasses not just science, art, education and entertainment but perversity, violence and voyeurism. It’s an aesthetic experience that persists to this day in the Channel 4 series Embarrassing Illnesses and the work of the controversial anatomist Gunther von Hagens, both touted as educational. A little higher up the cultural food chain is JG Ballard’s Crash. In the novel, Ballard defined the contemporary experience of city life as a combination of sexual excitement, bodily injury and technology—what is our experience of these anatomical models, if not that?