Mechanical Venus...

[Dave Monroe]

Never too late for me on the subject, thanks for the
reference!  Anatomical models, Max Ernst AND Marcel
Duchamp!  Slipped in under the radar.  I suspect the
Jordanova citations come from ...

Jordanova, Ludmilla.  Sexual Visions: Images of
   Gender in Science and Medicine Between the
   Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries.  Madison:
   U of Wisconsin P, 1989.

Let me know.  A few recent books of interest ...

During, Monika von.  Encyclopedia Anatomica:
   A Complete Collection of Anatomical Waxes.
   New York: Taschen, 1999.

Hansen, Julie V. and Suzanne Porter.
   The Physician's Art: Representations of Art
   and Medicine.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.   

Kemp, Martin and Marina Wallace.  Spectacular
   Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body
   from Leonardo to Now.  Berkeley: U of Cal P,
   2000.

Petherbridge, Deanna, ed.  The Quick and the
   Dead: Artists and Anatomy.  Berkeley: U of
   Cal P, 1998.

Sawday, Jonathan.  The Body Emblazoned:
   Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance
   Culture.  New York: Routledge, 1997.

Sheriff, Mary D.  The Exceptional Woman:
   Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural
   Politics of Art.  Chicago: U of Chicago P,
   1996.

Not to mention the very great ...

Stafford, Barbara Maria.  Body Criticism:
   Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and
   Medicine.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Now I just gotta find a cheap copy of that Hopkins
book.  I've had ... words with Cambridge University
Press about their pricing.  "Dear Mr. Monroe, I'm the
corporate flack in charge of gladhanding responses
..."   Seriously ...


--- Mark David Tristan Brenchley
<mdtb at st-andrews.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> Know I missed the window, and that this may be
> completely irrelevant, but
> I came across it yesterday so here you go:
> 
> "From the eighteenth century onwards a class of
> mechanical models entered
> into circulation in Europe for educational purposes,
> and for display
> in museums. In the ones used in Florence at the end
> of the 18th century,
> female figures were given accessories such as
> necklaces and allowed to
> sport luxurious growths of hair. Whilst they could
> be 'opened' to reveal
> their internal organs and thus subjected to the
> passionate probings of
> science, they also bore elevated iconographic
> meanings. They were called 
> 'Venuses' - although as Jordanova points out, they
> correspond more to the
> type of Bernin's St Theresa with their ecstatic
> facial expressions - and
> were often arranged in sexually inviting positions.
> They therefore helped
> to elucidate what Jordanova referred to  as, 'the
> mixture of eroticism,
> violence and idealisation in the desire to know more
> of female nature"
> 	- marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared;
> David Hopkins;
> 		Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998 p20.
> 
> regrads,
> Mark
> 


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