My Radio 4 appearance scoring very well with the "friends of my mum who live at the other end of the country and are unlikely to visit Leeds in the next 6 months" demographic.
Whether it's actually encouraging people who live round here to visit time will tell.
Here me talking sexy corpses on Radio 4 Front Row. (Episode also features Bridgerton and tourism tax)
Listen here:
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
Nice positive review from the world of art history academia.
globo.hypotheses.org/3244
A close up detail from the same image, showing two men quarreling, one holding a scalpel.
A close up detail of the same image. It shows a set of anatomists' tools: blades, knives, scalpels, a candle, and a pen in an inkpot.
Under the table, junior surgeons scrap for the chance to assist. But it's what's on the table that's more important: the tools of the trade. The scalpel, but also the pen. Dissection is integral to studying anatomy, but so is sharing the findings of dissections through books and images like this.
A close up detail of the same image, showing a man in robes, representing a depiction of the ancient Graeco-Roman physician Galen. Behind him you can just about see the arms of a monkey.
A close up detail of the same image. A man with a long beard - representing Hippocrates - looks down at a dog-like animal (sometimes said to be a goat)
Vesalius is flanked by the classical physicians Galen and Hippocrates, whose centuries' old accepted wisdom he debunked by dissecting actual human bodies.
Their reliance on understanding human anatomy through animal dissection is represented by them being paired with animal sidekicks.
A close up detail of the same image, showing a hooded monk in a praying position.
A close up detail from the same image of a man reaching into the pocket of thd man in front of him
A close up detail from the same image. A person is shown peering out from behind a column. They are hooded but appear potentially female.
The woman is the object of attention for a crowd of men from all sections of society. There's a praying monk, but also a man taking advantage of everyone's attention on the dissection to pick a pocket. There is even, half hidden behind a pillar, what looks like the only other woman in the scene.
A closer view of the previous image, showing a bearded man cutting into the woman's abdomen.
Beneath the looming memento mori of a giant skeletal reaper, Vesalius himself performs a dissection on an exposed female body (the only whole cadaver of a woman in the entire book).
It is reputedly based on a real dissection of an executed woman, conducted to prove she was not pregnant at the time
A busy black and white drawing of an anatomical dissection in the 1500s. A dead woman is being cut open in a crowded theatre. A skeleton hovers above her. She is in the centre of the image, with real world lighting spotlighting her body, while the edges of the frame have a pink glow from the surrounding lights.
Feature wall in our new exhibition: a huge blown up image of a dissection.
It is the title page of Andreas Vesalius's hugely influential De Humani Corporis Fabrica and contains a whole manifesto on the future of anatomy in its richly symbolic imagery.
A stack of steaming hot chocolate chip pancakes sitting on a plate that says "Pancakes?"
Pancake Day
“There are now more places to sell plasma than there are Costco stores [in the US] — and more are popping up in solidly middle-class neighborhoods”
A black card into which an anatomical heart illustration has been scratched, revealing flourescent rainbow colours
Anyone looking to make their own Sougy-esque anatomical images, scratch art crafts are a part of our half term offer.
thackraymuseum.co.uk/event/februa...
The poster for the Thackray Museum of Medicine's Beneath the Sheets exhibition, featuring the previous image of the man with his wrists bound above his head, on a lurid pink poster.
A baroque painting of Saint Sebastian. His arms are above his head, wrists bound in a very similar way to the anatomic illustration.
The main Catholic art reference point here, though, appears to be Guido Reni's infamously homoerotic depiction of the martyrdom of St Sebastian. No wonder Maclise's work has been seen as a "lost archive of queer expression".
A nineteenth-century illustration of a man with his chest open to reveal his internal organs. His hands are bound above his head. The picture is black and white, except the heart, which is coloured pink.
1850s - Couldn't not include the poster boy for our new exhibition, taken from Joseph Maclise's Surgical Anatomy. The pink heart really pops out like Christ's sacred heart in this monochrome image of the organs of the abdomen and thorax.
A wallchart showing a diagram of the of the circulatory system.
1940s - French-Canadian artist Pauline M. Lariviere broke with realist tradition to take influence from abstracts and cubism. She was less concerned with depicting organs as they appear in reality than with using colour, scale, and alternative angles to emphasise important details.
An anatomical chart of the nervous system, showing stylised organs in white lineart on a black background, and the nerves themselves as colourful abstract lines.
Sougy's wallcharts, intended for classrooms and lecture theatres, are characterised by stark black backgrounds and vibrant, almost flourescent, colourful linework, making them feel years ahead of their time.
1950s - Paul Sougy was a French curator at a natural history museum who was commissioned to draw a series of illustrations of the collections of 19th century naturalist and anatomist Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux (who made incredible papier-mâché models of organs and animals).
A simplified diagram of the heart in red and blue on a black background.
As it's Valentine's Day: my favourite anatomical illustrations of hearts from the museum collection...
Leeds back-to-back housing, Cross Oswald St, 1970, photo by Nick Hedges.
When AI was added to a tool for sinus surgery: “Cerebrospinal fluid leaked from one patient’s nose. In another… a surgeon mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull. In two other cases, patients suffered strokes after a major artery was accidentally injured”
www.reuters.com/investigatio...
A simple but expressive wood carved owl, painted black with yellow eyes and bold red plumicorns. https://collections.thackraymuseum.co.uk/object-717-010
As people are posting their #SuperbOwl examples and the owl is the symbol of our fair city, here's an owl inkwell from the Thackray Museum collection.
This one was hand carved by a patient at Meanwood Park Hospital
Come visit any time between now and June.
thackraymuseum.co.uk/event/bts/
A photo of two banners with a pink-white colour gradient hanging in front of a white wall. It is the entrance to a museum exhibition gallery. The larger banner has a quote from 18th century anatomical illustrator Arnauld Eloi Gautier d'Agoty. It says "For men to be instructed, they must be seduced by aesthetics, but how can anyone render the image of death agreeable." It is superimposed over an 18th century illustration of the muscles of the back, featuring a pronounced and well-defined gluteus maxmimus. The smaller banner is titled "Look Beneath" and contains smaller text introducing the exhibition.
Opening today at Thackray Museum of Medicine!
Beneath the Sheets: Anatomy, Art & Power
A brand new exhibition about bodies and the people who reveal them.
'Spanning five centuries, the deceased in the anatomical prints currently on show in the exhibition Beneath the Sheets: Anatomy, Art and Power, at Thackray Museum of Medicine...none of them consented to images of their unclothed, mutilated bodies being bound up in a book or displayed on a wall.'
Come and see the exhibition from Saturday.
thackraymuseum.co.uk/event/bts/
Enjoyed talking to BBC Culture about bodies, consent, sensuality, and how there's no such thing as objective illustrations of human anatomy.
www.bbc.co.uk/culture/arti...
From London to Delhi, but especially Leeds.
Nice to be featured in February's most anticipated new exhibitions worldwide.
No, I'm wrong to say 1975. That's me just glancing at the system number in the library catalogue not the date! (You can tell I'm more used to reading object records than library ones).
We do have it as 50s in the catalogue, but there's no publication date in it.
A 1970s illustration of the design of a hospital ward in mint green.
A photograph of the installation SICK: (a note from 40 Sandilands Road and other stories) by the artist Sarah Roberts. An imaginative and evocative recreation of a healthcare space, feeling like part of an abstract theatre set, it is painted in the same mint green as the previous picture
It was quite influential on the colour palette of this art installation - library.leeds.ac.uk/events/event... - Sarah did some of her research for the piece in our library.
It's a book of colour theory in the design of public buildings, produced by the paint manufacturer Jenson & Nicholson in 1975.
"The Function of Colour in Factories, Schools and Hospitals"
collections.thackraymuseum.co.uk/b166292
In a sensory themed morning, Victoria will be joined by friend of the museum's smellscape @claireturner.bsky.social, who will be taking a sidestep from making our galleries smell like wee and poo to sniff out the stench of cancer.
Should be a really interesting pair of lectures.
