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The strangest, without a doubt, is an 18th century wax figure known as the "Anatomical Venus": a comely young woman, life-sized and nude, lying prostrate on a pink silk cushion in what looks to be a state of sensual rapture, her torso flayed and all her glistening organs -- including a womb containing a tiny fetus -- revealed. Her long brown hair is real, her eyes are open and unfocused, and the cloth of her pillow is crumpled -- she might as well be writhing. The product of one sculptor's clearly intimate experience with cadavers, she suggests an Enlightenment-era St. Teresa ravished by communion with the invisible forces of science. --"Exposing classical art's true colors: A Getty Villa exhibit adds brilliant hues to works once thought to be unadorned." Holly Myers for the Los Angeles Times , 2008 Morbid Anatomy began in 2007 as a research tool for an exhibition called Anatomical Theatre , which explored the uncanny allure of historical wax medical models...

Painting of the Mater Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows), Italian School, Probably 16th Century. Via Bukowski's Auction House. From Wikipedia: The Seven Sorrows of Mary are a popular Roman Catholic devotion. In common religious Catholic imagery, the Blessed Virgin Mary is portrayed in a sorrowful and lacrimating affect, with seven daggers piercing her heart, often bleeding. Devotional prayers that consist of meditation began to elaborate on her Seven Sorrows based on the prophecy of Simeon... [Those seven sorrows are]: The Prophecy of Saint Simeon. ( Luke 2:34–35 ) The Escape and Flight into Egypt. ( Matthew 2:13 ) The Loss of the Child Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem. ( Luke 2:43–45 ) The Meeting of Mary and Jesus on the Via Dolorosa . The Crucifixion of Jesus on Mount Calvary. ( John 19:25 ) The Piercing of the Side of Jesus, and His Descent from the Cross. ( Matthew 27:57–59 ) The Burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. ( John 19:40–42 )

The Sleeping Beauty, a waxwork whose breast rises and falls ever so slightly, as seen in the video above. The model pictured here is a 1925 replica cast from his original mold after the original 1767 wax model destroyed in a fire and crafted by Philippe Curtius. Curtius was the uncle (or possibly the illegitimate father) of the Anne-Marie Grosholtz, who would rise to fame as a wax modeller in her own right under her married name Madame Tussaud.  This piece can still be seen, breathing gently, at Madame Tussaud's in London. In her book Phantasmagoria , Scholar Marina Warner says of this piece: "The illusion of permanent sleep is invoked to deny the reality of death... The Sleeping Beauty functions as anti-memento mori....she promises immortality as the suspension of time." Find out more in the new Morbid Anatomy book The Anatomical Venus , published by DAP in the US and Thames and Hudson in the rest of the world. You can find out more here .

Michael Sappol--historian at the National Library of Medicine ,  author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies , and curator of Dream Anatomy - -just shared news of a mysterious film in his Library's collection. This 1933 film contains, in the Library's own words, "an autopsy, perhaps the first ever performed before a motion picture camera. On screen, a bespectacled man in a white coat happily cuts open an unidentified dead man, chatting all the while with students and colleagues..." You can watch the film (probably NSFW) above. The full description of the film follows; you can also read a post about it on the Circulating Now blog. Herr Professor Doktor Jakob Erdheim Search the transcript 1933 / 5:16 Film fragment, no producer, no director, Vienna, Austria Silent, black-and-white. Sometime in the last century a fragment of silent film landed at the National Library of Medicine. How it got there is a mystery: no paperwork survives to tell the tale; no other prints of the fi...

The most incredible example of sadist-surrealist fantasy is to be found among the representations of the various phrases of childbirth and gynaecological operations. A complete model of a patient undergoing a Caesarean section lies with her eyes wide open, her face distorted by pain, her hair impeccable, her calves tied together, dressed in a long, lace nightgown, which is open only at the part of her body which has been cut open by a scalpel, where the baby appears. Four male hands are placed on her body (two operating, two holding her waist): fine wax hands with manicured nails, ghostly hands since they are not supported by arms but adorned only with white cuffs and with the ends of the sleeves of a black jacket, as though the whole ceremony was being held by people in evening dress. -- Italo Calvino on Dr Spitzner’s life-sized wax model of a caesarean section (above), from his essay ‘The Museum of Wax Monsters’, in Collection of Sand (first published in Italy in 1984, translated int...

Following is a guest post by Artist and Anatomist in Residence Emily Evans about flayed Saint Bartholomew and his curious afterlife in early anatomical illustration. You can find out more about Emily and her work here . Tradition holds that the apostle Bartholomew was martyred by being flayed alive. This brutal torture has been depicted in many different ways over the centuries. He is sometimes depicted holding the knife, which symbolizes his martyrdom. The artworks seem to evolve over time from showing him just before the blade strikes, to when flaying occurs and then in later works after the act, where he is draped in, or holding his own skin. It can be difficult to view these artworks reflecting the act of being skinned alive without squirming thinking of the pain and blood. This is especially so in the early religious paintings of the saint. Fine artists took the iconic portrayal of St. Bartholomew to use in their work. One of the most famous being Michelangelo who included Bartho...

Above is a wonderful short video piece on The Morbid Anatomy Museum and our current exhibition House of Wax , which features German anatomical models once on view at a 19th and early 20th century popular museum. The short was made by the folks at the Hofstra University produced For Your Island and includes interviews with our creative director Joanna Ebenstein and several visitors to the exhibition. You can see House of Wax--which was curated by Ryan Matthew Cohn --any day but Tuesday, 12-6 through May 30; You can find out more about the exhibition here . You can learn even more about the show at a lecture on April 5th by Dr. Peter M. McIsaac, German and Museum Studies at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who wrote the exhibition text; more on that can be found here .