Morbid Curiosity: Andreas Vesalius, Frederik Ruysch and the Early Modern Roots of von Hagens’ and Hirst’s Anatomical Displays: An Illustrated Zoom Lecture by David R Castillo

When critics asked anatomist Gunther von Hagens about his sensationalist marketing of his exhibits of plastinated cadavers, most notoriously sending the corpse of a pregnant woman (her torso cut open to reveal the fetus) on a bus ride around Berlin, his answer was simple: “Sensationalism means curiosity … and this curiosity brings people to museums” (Chicago Tribune). Today, we are likely to see connections with the controversial art of Damien Hirst, including his displays of dissected animals and his much publicized 18th century skull covered in diamonds, which the artist himself described as “the ultimate two fingers up to death” (Observer).

Indeed, von Hagens’ beautified corpses (like Hirst’s artistic displays of animal and human remains) work largely as thematic reversals of the classic vanitas motif. While von Hagens has linked his museum exhibits to the work of Andreas Vesalius (1452-1519) and the Renaissance tradition of public autopsies, I would argue that his compositions of plastinated corpses have more in common with the baroque dioramas of Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) and the curiosity cabinets of the 1500s and 1600s.

Tonight’s illustrated talk, by professor David R Castillo, author or Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities, will explore these historical connections while teasing out the “meaning” of von Hagens’s and Hirst’s anatomical displays in our hyper mediated world.

David R. Castillo is Humanities Institute Director and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. He is the author of Awry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque (Purdue UP, 2001) and Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities (Michigan UP, 2010) and co-author of Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics (Palgrave, 2016) and Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (Bloomsbury, 2016). Castillo has also co-edited Reason and Its Others (Vanderbilt UP, 2006), Spectacle and Topophilia (Vanderbilt UP, 2012), and Writing in the End Times (HIOL, 2019). He is currently working on a new book entitled Alt-Realities and coediting an essay collection on Continental Theory.

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