Confirmed Speaker abstracts H-R

 

James Hall: The Renaissance Artist as Anatomist:Bandinelli, Michelangelo and the Vogue for Creative Destruction

A new concept of the male artist emerges in sixteenth century Italy, in which creation goes hand in hand with destruction. This new breed of artist is Pygmalion’s alter-ego, a demonic figure who penetrates far beneath the skin to prove his power over his creations, and the depth / profundity of his knowledge. The most important catalyst is a concern amongst artists to demonstrate their anatomical expertise, and their mastery of the human body. This predatory idea of the artist is most closely associated with two Florentine sculptors who were devoted practitioners of anatomical dissection: Michelangelo (1475-64) and Baccio Bandinelli (1493-1560).

In his poems, Michelangelo frequently posits himself as a magisterial destructive force, and this kind of terribilità is manifested in a print showing him at work in Sigismondo Fanti’s Trionfo della Fortuna. He seems about to kill / destroy the reclining female sculpture he is working on (the Medici Chapel Dawn). Bandinelli becomes an even more demonic force in several self-portrait prints, where he appears to be an iconoclast, about to rip the heads of statuettes of Hercules. The anatomical roots of his art are shown in a print depicting his art academy in Rome, with skeletons in the foreground. This marks the start of a historical process that will culminate Picasso’s famous statement: ‘Every act of creation is first an act of destruction’.

 

James is a Research Professor at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (part-time), and an Art Historian, Critic, Lecturer and Broadcaster. He contributes to many publications including the Guardian Saturday Review and Times Literary Supplement. He lectures at many universities, museums and literary festivals. He has appeared on ‘Today’ and ’Start the Week’. He has written four critically acclaimed books: The World as Sculpture: the changing status of sculpture from the Renaissance to the present day (1999, Chatto); Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body (2005, Chatto); The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (2008, OUP); The Self-Portrait: a Cultural History (2014, Thames & Hudson) has already been translated into five languages.

 

Glenn Harcourt and Lisa Temple-Cox: DEAD ON ARRIVAL: The Afterlife of Stillborn Monsters

This paper will explore issues related to the physical and “personal” afterlife of specimens found in the anatomical and teratological collections of medical schools, natural history museums, and related institutions where such specimens have been collected for purposes of study, teaching, and display. In particular, we will be looking at the question of the extent to which such specimens (long referred to as examples of what were termed “monstrous births”) have been viewed as the material remains of “real” individual (or multiple) persons endowed with an irreducible self-hood, rather than as simple objects: specimens related to human beings through an entangling discourse of embryological development and its discontents, but not in-and-of-themselves endowed with the characteristic attributes of humanity. At best, such creatures might be said to exist only as incipient beings, images struck from a deformed or damaged template whose only “life” is in fact the afterlife accorded to them as pathological or teratological objects.

 

We will examine these questions first through a brief survey of the classic discourses of natural history and teratology: exemplified by the work of Ambroise Paré, Étienne Serres, and B.C. Hirst and G.A. Piersol. We will then contrast the picture developed through that survey with the work of a small number of contemporary artists (representative of a much larger cohort) whose depictions of pathological and teratological specimens has forcefully raised the issue of their essential self-hood, often in projects undertaken in collaboration with institutions where such specimens are stored, studied, and displayed – for example, the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the Hunterian Museum in London. Finally, we will suggest that this recent work has enabled the use of such “monstrous” images in the construction of metaphors for the contemporary understanding of the idea of “self” in general.

 

Lisa is is an artist based at Cuckoo Farm Studios in Colchester, UK. Her research concerns the aesthetics and symbolism of the medical museum; using its collections, taxonomies, and histories as metaphors for a contemporary subjective experience of the self and the body. Her background as a mixed-race, post-colonial child informs a practice exploring interstices: between science and religion, the normal and the pathological, the familiar and the uncanny. These themes are visualised through mixed-media processes which include drawing, assemblage, and installation.

 

Glenn is a writer who specialises in the history of art, contemporary art, and visual culture. Formerly a lecturer on Art History and the humanities, he is a regular contributor to art journals 'X-TRA' and 'Artillery', and is currently the recipient of a Wood Institute grant at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia to begin work on a "double biography" of one of the Mutter Museum's most popular specimens of pathological anatomy, Mary Ashberry.

 

Jack Hartnell: The Inverted Bodies of Maubuisson Abbey

This paper contributes to discussions of medieval and early modern anatomy in England by offering an intriguing comparative anatomical case-study from Northern France: the abbey of Maubuisson, situated just twenty kilometres outside Paris. From the very moment of its thirteenth-century foundation the medieval inhabitants of Maubuisson held an unusually strong preoccupation with opening dead human bodies. Beginning with the Abbey’s founder, Blanche of Castile, whose body was exhumed several months after burial for the removal of its heart, the foundation played host to a wide variety of surgically invaded corpses for some four-hundred years, including the heart and entrails of three queens, two kings, several aristocratic patrons, and various members of the church’s own community until its dissolution at the Revolution.

 

This piece brings these anatomical events into dialogue with a variety of sculptural markers made to commemorate them within the church, including Royal gisants clutching bags of entrails, lead-lined boxes containing excavated body parts buried within the building’s walls, copper inscriptions running around the foundation’s monuments, and a sculpture of the Virgin Mary that itself was split in two and could be opened and shut at will. In its longstanding associations with pseudo-anatomical practice, Maubuisson offers a number of directions for understanding similar relationships across the channel, positing sculpture as a pivotal point for understanding interactions between art, religion, and medicine.

 

Jack is Lecturer and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, New York, and from January 2017 will be Lecturer in Art History at the University of East Anglia. He received his PhD in 2014 at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, with a thesis exploring visual cultures of medieval anatomy. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at The Courtauld, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin. His recent publications include works on medieval surgical instruments and the anatomical practices of modern art conservation. He is currently completing two monographs: an introduction to medieval medicine and art for the Wellcome Trust, entitled Medieval Bodies, and a new book on the cryptic surgical image known as the Wound Man.

 

Katherine Harvey: Interpreting the Episcopal Corpse in Medieval England

This paper considers the significance of the episcopal corpse, focusing on English bishops of the 12th to 15th centuries. It begins by investigating what happened in the immediate aftermath of a bishop’s death, including preparation and preservation, display of the corpse, and the use of effigies. It then considers the importance of tomb-openings, which allowed the remains of long-dead bishops to be re-viewed years after their initial interment. It asks why such viewings were thought desirable, and how episcopal bodies were treated on such occasions. Who was allowed to handle and view the remains? What could a bishop’s corpse reveal about his conduct and character? How could the condition of a corpse support or undermine an individual bishop’s reputation for sanctity, given the perceived relationship between corporeal integrity, bodily purity and sanctity? How were episcopal corpses related to notions of episcopal lineage and the corporate identities of cathedrals? Overall, the paper will argue that a bishop’s corpse was an object of great cultural significance, which played a significant role in shaping his post-mortem reputation.  

 

Katherine is a Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Research Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on the later medieval English episcopate. She has published a book on episcopal appointments (Episcopal Appointments in England, c.1214-1344, Ashgate, 2014), as well as papers on episcopal enthronements, sexuality and emotions. Her current research project focuses on the episcopal body and its experiences of health, sickness and death.

 

Marieke Hendriksen: Casting life, casting death: the relation between early modern corrosive preparations and artistic casting techniques

Although the historical connections between anatomy and the visual arts have been explored in quite some depth, especially in the cases of early modern anatomical drawing, sculpting, the making of wet preparations and wax modelling, the role of artistic techniques in the creation of corrosive preparations has received little attention thus far. This is remarkable, as there appear to be significant similarities between casting techniques like those employed by Jamnitzer and anatomical corrosive techniques. This paper explores these similarities and argues that the distinction between artistic and anatomical techniques was long non-existent; a largely artificial division retrospectively enforced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians. It does so by analysing the material and technical qualities of corrosive preparations from the period 1700-1900, and by comparing the results from this analysis with written instructions for making corrosive preparations and making casts from the same period in both anatomical and artist handbooks. Moreover, the paper links this analysis to the development of the word ‘technique’ as a neologism in the eighteenth century, a semantic shift which coincided with the emergence of the ideal of the disinterested in art and philosophy, and with the creation of the new category of fine arts, which was distinct from crafts, liberal arts and natural philosophy. 

 

Marieke gained her PhD from Leiden University in 2012. She is a historian of medicine currently based at Utrecht University. She published a monograph and a number of journal articles since, and worked in London, Berlin, and Groningen. She is particularly interested in the material culture of eighteenth-century medicine, recipes, and the intersections between art and science. 

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Angela Hennessy: From the Morgue to the Museum: Contemporary Artists

From the intimate to the monumental, the impulse to archive the lives of the dead has produced a rich history of aesthetic practices in sacred, public, and domestic realms. Images and objects have mediated the boundaries between the living and the dead—from the mourning body to the post-mortem body. But for many of us, the post-mortem body is not a body that we know and mourning traditions have long ago been lost or forgotten. In this absence, contemporary artists, both professional and emerging, are indulging their morbid fascinations with reimagined memorial objects, funeral performances, and ceremonial last words. Addressing themes of disembodiment, violence, testimony, resurrection, and contamination, these works reflect shifting ideas regarding personal grief, public mourning, and cultural trauma. Bored by the stilled lives of the natural history display, Death is haunting the museum setting like never before. This presentation examines the current re-emergence of Death in contemporary art environments where it is very much alive.

 

Angela is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist and Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts. She teaches courses on death, textile theory, and strategies of feminist art. Her practice examines mythologies of blackness using linguistic metaphors of color and cloth. Her research on death and textiles in the work of Teresa Margolles was published in Surface Design Journal in 2014. Recent conference presentations include Death: Ok at Reed College, Portland, Oregon and Textile Society of America: New Directions, Los Angeles, California. She volunteers with hospice and consults with families on home funerals, grief recovery, and mourning rituals.

 

Jude Jones: Effigial bodies, sleeping and waking: investigating the meanings of figurative art and tomb sculpture 1560-1680

Deriving from the long European medieval tradition of elite effigial mortuary monuments which included the use of the transi from the 15th century, post-medieval Britain saw a sudden efflorescence of the effigial tomb partially prompted by the Reformation’s suppression of religious iconography during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I.While many early modern effigial sculptures can seem relatively formulaic in terms of their appearance and siting, their popularity and the increased demand for them across Britain imply that erecting them was not just a matter of fashion or taste. Family monuments became for many of the upper classes evidence not just of status but of their own personal significance within post-Reformation cosmology and this was also reiterated in a developing genre of mortuary portraiture. A characteristic of many figurative tombs and paintings is their reference to sleeping and beds which are used as a socio-religious framework for the bodily representation of the dead.This paper explores the connections between early modern ideas of death, its expression through effigy and portrait and the nuances which result when the paraphernalia of sleep is included. I consider the means these images employ, clothed in various forms and surrounded by vital contemporary mortuary symbols, to convey the body’s anatomical, political and religious perdurance. I also explore the possibility that these means obliged their living observers to envisage them as actors occupying a liminal state – halfway between waking/living and sleeping/dying – which cheated time and underscored their continued agency within the ranks of succeeding generations.

 

Jude received her doctorate in 2013 and is a specialist in the historical and social archaeology of the early modern period (1500-1800), in building analysis, local history and mortuary and tomb studies. Her thesis ‘Dances of Life and Death’ (Jones 2013 - presently being rewritten for publication) was an examination of post-medieval rural religious identity taken from a sample of 50 parish churches running along the East Hampshire/West Sussex border. Effigial tombs have featured in a number of her publications, most notably ‘Embodied Shadows: reading gender issues embedded in early modern tomb effigies and mortuary memorials 1500-1680’ in M Penman (ed) Monuments and Monumentality across medieval and early modern Europe (2013). She has worked for English Heritage and been a part-time lecturer at the University of Southampton since 2009, teaching anthropology, medieval archaeology, history of archaeology and building archaeology and has taught building archaeology to adult education classes in several institutions. She is deeply interested in archaeological theory especially theoretical ideas concerned with matters of the body, space, materiality and gender. She has also organised a suite of conferences including the Society for Church Archaeology’s 2011 Churches and the Sea conference in Chichester and (with other members of Southampton Department of Archaeology) the highly successful Buildings and the Body Symposium held at Southampton University in 2014. Since 2013 she has co-directed and acted as Finds Co-ordinator for the Basing House Project - an on-going seasonal excavation in the 16th century ruins of Basing House run under the auspices of the Universities of Southampton and York and in partnership with Hampshire Cultural Trust.

 

Pamela King: Cadaver tombs – whose choice?

The earliest recorded and surviving cadaver monument in the British Isles is the polychrome double tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele in Canterbury Cathedral. Chichele died in 1443, but chance evidence of a sanctuary-seeker clinging to the archbishop’s new tomb pinpoints the date of its construction to 1427. In this year Chichele had been in poor health and in dispute with the papacy about the celebration of a Becket jubilee. He is recorded as having prayed daily at his tomb from the date of its completion until his death.

This account is well known. In my lecture I shall offer some speculation about the factors leading to Chichele’s choice, and in turn, the same choice when it was made by members of his immediate circle. But equally there are the more inscrutable cases of individuals who were commemorated in tombs incorporating the image of the corpse of skeleton where the choice may not have been their own, and in some cases could not have been. So how were they singled out to deserve such a startlingly grisly commemoration and by whom? I shall look at a brief range of individual cases in which I can offer suggestions about whose the choice was, offering approaches to questions of whether the choices were regional, supply or demand-led.

 

The choice of a cadaver tomb is performative, in the sense made familiar by Ervin Goffman in his classic sociological study The Performance of Everyday Life; this lecture will therefore concentrate on the proposition that the choice of tomb design was at least as much social, or fashion-driven, as it was an expression of devotional tastes (though even that separation in the fifteenth century is relatively specious), and will explore something of the reception, desired or actual, that the choice signified.

 

Pamela is a graduate of the Universities of Edinburgh and York, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on 'Contexts of the Cadaver Tomb in England to 1550'. An interdisciplinary medievalist, she has held posts in the Universities of Warwick, York, London, and Cumbria. She held the Chair in Medieval Studies in the University of Bristol before coming to the University of Glasgow as part-time Professor of Medieval Studies. She is now also acquisitions editor for the revamped Early Drama, Art and Music (EDAM) imprint within Medieval Institute Publications (Kalamazoo), as well as running a 'tiny house' letting business and keeping bees on her croft in the NW Highlands. Her research interests are in late medieval literature, especially drama; manuscript studies; late medieval cultural history, especially tomb sculpture and burial practices, religious art; European civic festivals from the Middle Ages to present times; and theatre history. Her numerous publications and research grant awards can be found here.

 

Elli Leventaki: Representing death in the contemporary museum:photography and human loss

Photography is a powerful means of recreating memories. Due to the importance of sight in the western culture, a photograph can easily influence a person’s feelings and emotional state. It is a fragment of the past that works as a material proof of a previous existing situation. This way, it can help a person deal with the absence of a loved one, and with any other painful event that costed human lives. A photo can be a reminder of happier times, a souvenir, or an object that causes nostalgia and reminiscing.

Museums are often related with major local or national affairs, and they are even totally dedicated to one sometimes. When a tragic event that caused multiple, sudden, and usually violent deaths has taken place, a memorial has to be made in order to deal with the human loss. Especially if there has been a national tragedy, the state may even fund a whole museum to honor the dead and ease the pain of their families. In these cases, depending on the approach of the facts and the choices made by the museum, there’s a certain point of view formed. However, there are different perspectives regarding death and the ways it should influence the collective memory.

 

The National September 11 Memorial Museum (USA), as well as The Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Chile), have both used photography as their main tool for representing and dealing with national painful circumstances, but not in the same way. Collective mourning or collective remembrance can constitute two different approaches, as the interpretation depends on the way photographs are presented within a certain context. Distance or empathy? Light or darkness? Familiarity or awe? Attitudes when facing death vary.

 

Elli is currently a postgraduate student on the field of art history and curating, in the Department of Fine Arts and Sciences of Art at the University of Ioannina. She is shortly presenting her thesis on institutional critique and at the same time she is volunteering at the 5th Athens Biennale. She has also participated in conferences in Greece and abroad, and she is trying to be an active member of the academic society. Her research interests are not limited in one area of study, as she supports an interdisciplinary way of thinking.

 

Nigel Llewllyn: Bronze Bodies

Amongst its many other treasures Winchester Cathedral is the site of a unique set of monumental rarities, the bronze statues of the early Stuart kings, James I & VI and Charles I.  It is also home to one of the most extraordinary early seventeenth-century funeral monuments in England: the tomb of Richard Weston, Earl of Portland.  Weston (1577-1635) was amongst the most prominent of early Stuart courtiers and politicians and, following a lengthy period as Chancellor of the Exchequer, is credited with returning Charles I's crown budget to the black after many years of insolvency.  Bronze statues and monumental effigies such as those at Winchester occur very infrequently in post-Reformation England but, as is well known, the sculptural medium of cast bronze has a long lineage running back to classical antiquity and bronze has a cultural significance that is several thousand years older still.  Taking as its starting point the Winchester bronze statues, this lecture will consider how sculptures like these are made and their symbolic significance for their first audiences in the 1630s.  Compared to their modelled or sculpted counter-parts how did bronze figures replicate or represent the anatomical body?  Were they simply an expression of a fashionable Neo-classical aesthetic, in which case, what exactly was the attraction and what were the classical and Renaissance models that the artists and patrons had in mind?  What relationship did these sculptures have to other and earlier bronze statues and effigies, in England or elsewhere in Europe?  Given their vast expense and the demanding technical challenge that these sculptures represented, what was the attraction to the patron in commissioning them?  Finally, the lecture will consider the question of the colour of effigies in early seventeenth-century England.  Why were these bronze bodies “bronzed” or gilded and what did their various hues mean to contemporary observers or was bronze intended to be read as non-colour, to be artificially monumental in its unnaturalness?

 

Nigel retired last year as Head of Research at Tate having worked previously as Programme Director on the Research Centres Scheme for the Arts and Humanities Research Council and as a Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex.  He was trained at the University of East Anglia, at the Warburg Institute in London - where his teachers included EH Gombrich - and at the University of Cambridge.  He served as Chair of the Association of Art Historians and as Academic Director of the International Congress of the History of Art, which took place in London in 2000.   He has curated two exhibitions at the V&A, “The Art of Death” (1992) and “Baroque 1620-1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence” in 2009.  An Honorary Research Fellow at both the V&A and at Tate and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, in 2001 he was awarded an Honorary D.Litt by the University of Brighton.  His research interests cover a number of aspects of early modern continental and British art, especially architectural theory, visual mythology, the visual culture of commemoration and the historiography and methodology of art history.  He is the author of over fifty scholarly articles, essays and chapters in these fields, and his books written or edited include: Renaissance Bodies (1990), The Art of Death (1991), Funeral Monuments in post-Reformation England (2000), Baroque (2009), Church Monuments in East Sussex, 1530-1820 (2011), The London Art Schools (Tate, 2015) and Court Country City: British Art 1660-1735, which Yale University Press will published later this year.  He is now editing a volume for the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Death and researching the life and times of England's foremost seventeenth-century tomb-maker Nicholas Stone.

 

Teresa Lousa: What about Corpse as an Artistic Resource?

Human relationship with the awareness of death is related since prehistorical times, and is manifested primarily in his conduct towards the corpses. How did the corpse have passed from a sacred and interdict object to a mere artistic resource?

In some Damien Hirst’s most famous works, the artist uses corpses, or parts of corpses as artistic materials. Yet, the reactions that his finished pieces actually bring forth in the viewer are far from repulsion. In the work For the Love of God,  Hirst makes use of the most emblematic part of the human body: the skull, which he covered the with the authentic diamonds. Another case is the famouse work of Gunther Von Hagens, which was the first to improve the technique of plastination capable of preserving corpses. His exibithions are shown in major international cities and are attracting thousands of visitors wherever they are staged. Those corpses look like artistically sculpted bodies, without the overwhelmed reality of the decaying body, that the contact with death usually provides.  

The process of idealization and aesthetification, that we can notice in the cases above mencioned, is quite evident. Even though the skull or the bodies are authentic what is extraordinarily curious is that the artifical embellishment of those corpses can turn this vain and dark matter into a true objects of desire. In an extremely paradoxical way these sculptures composed of real corpses establish an aesthetic approach to death and an invitation for reflection about life.

 

Teresa has a PhD in Sciences of Art and heritage from the Fine Arts Faculty of the Lisbon University, where she teaches as an assistant professor. She has several papers published and also participates in various international colloquia in an academic context. Her articles and chapters in anthologies address the following topics: Humanism, Renaissance, Neo-Platonism, Furor Divine and inspiration, Melancholy, Macabre Art, Horror Aesthetics, Sublime, Genius Theory,  

 

Kimberly  Luther: The Body Reflected Through Ceramic Sculptures

I sculpt parts and segments of the body that oscillate between specimen and relic realized through a ceramic object. Through my sculptures I aim to take the recognizable and transform it into something new in order to hint at the occult wonders, mythologies, and obscure secrets that I create. Three themes gleaned from these ideas are ‘Saints & Secrets,’ ‘Anatomy,’ and ‘The Collection.’  I reference saints for their connection to something beyond our understanding and the wondrous evidence of this within their bodies. My investigation on saints began after reading about those whose faith manifested internally, revealing objects and images that would be found during their embalming, such as Chiara da Montefalco. The forms allude to anatomical illustrations from the Renaissance and 18th century that revealed hidden parts of the body to the viewer. My work reflects what is unseen back at the viewer, as if, like the illustrations, they are looking into themselves. These sculptures reveal what is not real, distorted and faintly familiar anatomy, in order to create a new sense of wonder and investigation of the body. Collections meant for scientific study and learning, for me are analogous with rooms of reliquaries or crypts of bones.  Like the saints and anatomical illustrations, curiosity cabinets made unseen things visible. By unifying these themes, the viewer is exposed to my created wonders and obscure secrets of the body, which aim to generate insight into the nature of being and seeing.

 

Kimberly is a painter and sculptor living in Kansas City, Missouri.  She attended the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, receiving a BFA in Fine Art in 2011. Luther then moved to Bloomington Indiana to attend the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University for a post-baccalaureate in Ceramics.  She graduated with her MFA from Indiana University in 2015.

Luther’s approach to creating is inspired by historical anatomy, occult iconography and the curiosity collections where the two overlap one another.  Her artwork has been exhibited in Indianapolis, Kansas City, Seattle, Castelló, Spain and Kecskemet Hungary. Her website is Klavonneluther.wordpress.com

 

Lucy Lyons: Anatomica: Drawing parallels

When encountering specimens in medical museums, the ones often seen as being the most contentious or problematic are the foetal and neonatal specimens. They can cause the greatest reaction. During 18 months as artist in residence at Barts Pathology museum I co ordinated a project which explored how artistic encounters with these specimens may be a way to allow them to be used sensitively and be appreciated rather than left unused, hidden away or destroyed. I will propose to not present the data analysis and findings of the research but the art that was created directly from the project. I was invited to respond to the methodology of the research, to create art that showed how the activity of drawing had such a powerful impact on how participants responded and built relationships with the specimens they spent time observing. It is this connection, this way in to looking, drawing, building relationships and getting a better appreciation and understanding of the specimens that I wish to discuss. I will present the 6-minute installation piece “Drawing Parallels.” It portrays the fleeting, fragility of the foetal and neonatal specimens and the words people found to describe the way drawing made them feel about them. The soundtrack is the sound of drawing and the sound of being present and in the presence of these wonderful specimens. It describes how drawing takes the viewer past the horror and death and helps them see the beauty and wonder within.

 

Lucy investigates drawing as an activity that evidences experience and communicates knowledge in medical sciences. Her PhD used drawing to investigate the breadth of experiences of FOP. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at Medical Museion at University of Copenhagen she investigated ageing through drawing practice. She lecturers in drawing research and painting at City & Guilds of London Art School and is visiting lecturer on the MEd course at Imperial College. At Barts Pathology Museum QMUL she co ordinated a Share Academy project in partnership between UCL, UAL and London Museums Group. She is currently “Art, Science, Life” Artist in Residence at Ipswich Museum.

 

Lucy May: Hypertrophy: Metamorphosis through Pain and Narratives of Death

Using my artworks as prompts, I will present the following metaphors to explore the themes of death, art and anatomy:

The boxing ring as theatre

The body as boxing bag

Sculpture as stilled sensation

Pain as metamorphosis

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Lucy is an artist and Thai boxer based in London. Her work in sculpture is influenced by ongoing studies in human anatomy, Baroque art and ornamentation and her experiences competing in Muay Thai. This late developing interest in combat sports and physical training has provided a starkly contrasting dimension to an introspective and individualistic creative output. Her works are realised using traditional techniques, such as wax modelling, casting in bronze and plaster and observational drawing. Her website is www.lucymay.net

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Cameron Newham: A literal overview of cadaver and skeletal effigies in England

Cadaver and skeletal effigies, of which over seventy remain in English churches, range in date from the mid-15th

century all the way up to the end of the 17th century and cover a large geographical area. Manyof the effigies, especially those from the mediaeval period, are hard to appreciate because of their position inside or underneath tomb chests.Using special photographic techniques, these effigies can now beviewed as if from above, providing new insights into the representations of death and the accuracy of anatomical sculpture. This paper will provide a general introduction to the tombs and effigies. Importantand unusual examples will be illustrated using photographs from the author's extensive photographic library.

 

Cameron is a photographer and author with a BSc in information technology and geography, as well as being a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He is photographically documenting all of the rural parishchurches in England and has in the

past nineteen years covered over eighty percent of them.

 

Maruis O'Shea: La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Eros and Thanatos in 19th century Art, with particular emphasis on Symbolism

An examination of some aspects of the social and emotional/intellectual background to the intertwining of eroticism and death in the painting, sculpture and poetry of the Art of the 19th century, from Romanticism to Symbolism. While focusing mainly on the visual aspects of the phenomenon with its emphasis on subjectivity rather than realism through the expression of emotions, feelings, and ideas, the influence of poetry, from Keats and Rossetti to Les Poètes Maudits, is seen as a driving influence on the painters and sculptors of the era. The pessimistic, philosophy of Schopenhauer is seen as a seminal influence on the thinking of the artists most influential in the development of the movement, as is the growing awareness of and interest in Eastern philosophy. The milieu of Paris during Freud’s sojourn there is again seen as influential on his later thoughts on the  the ‘Cult of Death’ in the century, as openly acknowledged as discussion of sex was taboo, is related to the public’s gradual acceptance and eventual embrace of Symbolism as embodying fundamental truths about the weltanschauung of late 19th century Western thought. Visual artists featured will range from Delacroix, Rossetti and C.D. Friedrich to Moreau, Redon, Ensor, Toorop, Munch, Klimt, Gauguin and van Gogh, whose influence feeds into the other mainstream of Modernism flowing through Dadaism and Surrealism.

 

Maruis was born in Northern Ireland, and attended Art School in Belfast, wandering as far as Israel on an Arts Council of N.I. Travel Scholarship. He has taught in various schools in the inner city London and gained a BA Honours in History of Art course at Birkbeck and the Courtauld Institute. He later moved to Singapore where he taught on the Art Elective Program. He gained an M.Ed. University of Sheffield and lectured at the National Institute of Education, Singapore, gaining an M.A. in Mass Communications, from Leicester University. He also has a PhD in Art Theory and Studio Practice, from the University of Newcastle, NSW and has been in the U.A.E. since 2007. he has an obsessive interest in labyrinths and the Green Man.

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Pascale Pollier: Art inspired by Death and Mortality

The essence of my talk is probably best distilled into 2 poems. I wrote “The Quick and the Dead” after many drawing sessions at the dissection rooms of the UCL during my Medical Art training, about 20 years ago.

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

MORTAL FLESH AND BONE WITH BENIGN FLEETING SOUL
COMPOSED GRIEF-STRICKEN STRUCTURE
I DOTH REQUIRE YOUR DISENGAGED FRAME, YOUR RELINQUISHED MOULD

BEFORE THIS BEAUTIFUL PERFECTION MINGLES MOIST TURF AND OAK
AND THROWES OF GRAVEYARD SOIL
MANY BRIGHTS HAVE WROUGHT
AND EYED UPON THEE
AND CHALKED ETERNAL MASTERWORKS FROM THEE
BEQUEATH THEREFORE YOUR STRANGE INTRIGUING TENEMENTS OF CLAY
TO MEDIC SHAMAN AND ARTIST
AND BEHOLD
AS ABSOLUTE AWAITS

 

The Poem “Still Here” was written more recently after the Biomab dissection drawing days that we organised in Antwerp. This is a yearly event at the  University which has become very popular indeed.

On observing a nervousness in the artists and students present that was very similar to the unease that I had felt when I was a student, confronted with a body devoid of life, I wrote the following poem; 

STILL HERE

THE MAN IN A WHITE STILLNESS ZIPPED UP ENCIRCLED
WITH NERVOUS ENERGY OPPONENTS
THE MOTIONLESSNESS SERENE ABSENCE OF MOVEMENT,
MOVING US SO DEEPLY
THE NON BEATING OF THE HEART
MAKING OURS SKIP FASTER THAN EVER.
LIMB BY LIMB REMOVED BROUGHT US TOGETHER
AN AFTERBIRTH INDEED EMOTIONS POURING OUT
LIKE THE WRINKLED PINK SOFT SKIN CURTAIN
DRIPPING CLEAR RED, YELLOW-ORANGE

DEEP GREENISH BLUE

LIKE THE LIGHT SHINING THROUGH
THE MELANCHOLIC AFTERBIRTH’S LYRICAL DARK HUE
WE ARE STILL HERE

 

Pascale, a Belgian National, studied fine art and Painting at St Lucas art school in Ghent, Belgium, and subsequently postgraduate training with the Medical Artists Association, London UK. She was co-founder and president of BIOMAB (Biological and Medical Art in Belgium)  and now in the role of scientific advisor to Biomab’s study programme Art Researches Science , she is curating and organising exhibitions, dissection drawing classes, collaborative art/science projects, symposiums and conferences. In 2015 she became co founder and president of the nonprofit organisation ARSIC “Art Researches Science International Collaborations, an international collective where Art and Science become entangled. This interdisciplinary association unites artists, scientists and those with a passion for the synergy between Art and Science, Technology and Philosophy. ARSIC pursues several goals. Organising and curating SciArt exhibitions, conferences and collaborative projects, supporting the publication of articles, books and films.  Pascale was an external examiner for the medical art course at The Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification, University of Dundee, and is President of AEIMS (Association Europeenes des Illustrateurs Medicaux et Scientifiques). Pascale currently lives and works in London as a self-employed artist; artem-medicalis.​

 

Emily Poore: Sex, death and the Landsknecht: Albrecht Dürer’s Syphilitic Man as an innovative epidemiological diagram

In the summer of 1495, a horrifying new disease began to spread among troops of French soldiers invading the Kingdom of Naples during the Italian Wars. The illness – which was first called the ‘French Disease’, and later ‘syphilis’ – started as a small cluster of genital lesions that quickly spread to cover the body in excruciating boils and pustules. In the early years of the epidemic, when the disease was most virulent, syphilis killed many unfortunate victims.

 

Albrecht Dürer’s Syphilitic Man (1496) was the first European image to depict the symptoms of syphilis. The print is ostensibly a coarse, crudely-made woodcut that depicts a mercenary solider (Landsknecht) who is covered in ugly, nodular lesions. Further investigation shows, however, that the apparent roughness of the print belies its true status as an innovative and pioneering example of graphic design. This paper will argue that when designing Syphilitic Man, Dürer synthesised a number of traditional visual modes quoted from religious and secular sources to create an innovative image: an epidemiological diagram. In doing so, he skilfully rose to the challenge of depicting a previously unknown disease in a form that could be readily understood by lay and educated viewers alike. In light of Dürer’s example, new associations between Landsknechte and death were established. Immoderate behaviour and the movement of the planets were identified as potential risks to their mortality, in addition to the violence of the battlefield.

 

Emily is Curatorial Assistant at the University of Queensland Art Museum, where she recently co-curated the exhibition Wunderkammer: The Strange and the Curious (2015) and contributed to the exhibition catalogue Five Centuries of Melancholia (2014). In 2015, she completed a Bachelor of Arts (Art History) and received First Class Honours for her thesis The Portable Pox: The Iconography of the French Disease in German Woodcuts (1496–1530). She also has a Bachelor of Science (Medical Science) and worked for more than 10 years as a microbiologist focusing on bacterial agents of disease.

 

Ellie Pridgeon: Considering Cadavers in Medieval and Post-Reformation Wall Painting

This paper will examine representations of cadavers in English medieval wall painting, focusing on Three Living and Three Dead imagery.  Surviving paintings include Hurstbourne Tarrant (Hampshire) and Tarrant Crawford (Dorset).  The paper will consider the function of this imagery in the medieval parish church, location patterns, the patrons who commissioned the murals, and how and why anatomical representations developed over time and from painting to painting.  The paper will also apply a chronology to the painting corpus by drawing stylistic and typological similarities with manuscript, monument and woodcut imagery.

 

The paper will consider why, how and when wall paintings were destroyed or whitewashed at the Reformation, and the nature of the post-Reformation murals which eventually replaced them – in particular the corpus of skeletal figures representing Death (for instance at Ashby St Ledgers [Northamptonshire] and Abbey Dore [Herefordshire]).  The paper will also consider precisely how the function, location, patronage and anatomical representations of these cadaver paintings differed from their medieval counterparts. 

 

Ellie is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Leicester. She has published extensively on medieval wall painting in England and Wales (see https://medievalwallpaintings.wordpress.com). Ellie is currently a researcher on the Post Reformation Wall Painting Project, run in conjunction with photographer Cameron B. Newham (see https://postreformationwallpaintingproject.wordpress.com). Ellie is a Church Monuments Society council member, co-Chair of HistoryLabPlus, and Chair of the Archives for Learning and Education Section (UK and Ireland).

 

Carol Rawcliffe: Death in the Late Medieval Hospital

The burial of the dead, and especially of those who could not afford a decent funeral, was an obligation incumbent upon all medieval Christians, and one that hospitals were particularly well placed to perform.  Here, the dying received the spiritual medicine of confession, absolution, the last rites and burial, which ensured their place in the community of the Church and benefited the health of their immortal souls.  Such heavy responsibilities could, however, place a severe strain upon spatial and financial resources, which might be offset by providing lavish funerals and lasting commemoration for wealthy patrons. Astute administrators were well aware of the need to tap into such a potentially lucrative market, even if it involved a substantial initial outlay.  For, in their anxiety to avoid the fires of purgatory and to enlist the intercessionary prayers of the sick poor, these men and women demanded high liturgical standards.  Their requirements had a striking impact upon the layout, function and personnel of the larger European hospitals, many of which were restructured after the Black Death to provide space for elaborate rituals, tombs, bell towers, chantry chapels and choir stalls.  Even in the case of leprosaria, which were obliged by canon law to provide separate cemeteries for their inmates, this expansion into a competitive market could antagonise other religious institutions, alarmed by their own loss of earnings in a time of economic recession.    

 

Carole is Professor Emerita of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia.  She has published on many aspects of medical and social history, with a particular emphasis upon hospitals, the interconnection between religion and medicine and medieval attitudes to both sickness and health.  Her books include Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (1995), Medicine for the Soul (1999), Leprosy in Medieval England (2006) and Urban Bodies (2013). 

 

Romany Reagan: 'Cult of the Dead' or 'Death Positive'? An analysis of Victorian mourning ephemera and its role in death acceptance

One of the Victorian tokens of mourning and remembrance that is perhaps least understood today is mourning hair jewellery and art. While attached to the head of a living person, contemporary aesthetics prize a full head of hair as beautiful, attractive, even a source of desire. However, when it falls out onto a table, into a drain, or into your soup – it becomes an abomination. This interesting paradox is something many of us may take for granted in our current society. However, for the Victorians, the hair of a loved one was not repulsive. It was an intimate substance woven like silk into intricate wall art or worn jewellery.

The Victorian style of mourning has been termed the ‘Cult of the Dead’; however, the twentieth-century could be more
appropriately termed the ‘Phobic of the Dead’. Unpacking the evolution of Western society’s relationships with death (Mellor; Littlewood), and why mourning practices are important to processing the human experience (Becker;
Gorer), this paper presents Victorian memorial items – such as mourning hair art and jewellery, post-mortem photography, and the practice of keeping these mementos at home in ‘micro-museums’ – and investigates what these items offered the bereaved as healthy tools to work through grief (Stevens Curl; Hallam and Hockey). The paper concludes with a look at our contemporary turn, in certain circles, towards a more accepting view of death – termed the ‘Death Positive’ movement (Doughty), which has many similarities to the Victorian ‘Cult of the Dead’ – and how these items have found new life and appreciation today.

 

Romany is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, currently in her write-up year. Her thesis centres around performing heritage, specifically audio tours in Abney Park Cemetery. Her research on mourning heritage juxtaposes the Victorian 'cult of the dead' against what I have termed the 20th century's 'phobic of the dead' and draws correlations between Victorian mourning practices and today's 'death positive' movement to posit we are beginning to come full circle in our Western contemporary views on death acceptance and mourning ritual to echo more those of the Victorian period. Her walk ‘Crossing Paths/Different Worlds in Abney Park Cemetery’ was published in Ways to Wander (Triarchy Press, 2015).

 

Martin Robert: Tales of Corpses: Grave-Robbery in 19th-Century Quebec Literature

Grave robbing for medical dissections, also called resurrectionism or body snatching, has been the subject of growing scholarship in the last three decades. Since the publication of Ruth Richardon’s milestone study Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987), focusing on early-nineteenth-century Britain, other historical studies have been published on cases in France and in the United States. Some of them discuss the repercussions of the phenomenon in literature. Literary works on body snatching were indeed produced in the nineteenth century wherever it took place, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to novels by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson or French writer Prosper Mars.              

In this paper, I will examine the following problem: how did body snatching literature become possible by the late 1830s in the Canadian province of Quebec? Based on a body of thirty fictional stories published in Quebec between 1837 and 1945, my analysis will seek possible connections between these stories and resurrectionist literature produced at the same time in France and Britain. I will then evaluate the possible influence of actual cases of body snatching in Quebec on the stories. Finally, I will discuss their place within the biography of their authors.

 

Martin is a doctoral student in history at the University du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and at the Centre Alexandre-Koyré d’histoire des sciences (CNRS-Paris). In 2014, he completed a Master's thesis on the advent of cremation in Quebec, Canada. Thanks to a Vanier scholarship, he is now working on his doctoral research focused on the history of body snatching and anatomical education in nineteenth-century Quebec.

 

Guillem Roca: Medical practice in Lleida (Spain) during the fourteenth century

The city of Lleida presents an incomparable case for the study of medical practice in fourteenth-century society. On the one hand, it was there that in the year 1300 King James II founded the first Studium Generale of the kingdom, which was greatly influenced by the physician Arnau de Vilanova and the philosopher Rymundus Lullius. On the other hand, the influence of university medicine in the city can be studied using the "books of crimes" which cover the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. They contain several medical reports of people injured in fights as well as descriptions of cures for wounded or poisoned victims. It is clear that physicians studied the body on the basis of their anatomical knowledge and anatomy was not practiced using dead bodies. But an important part of practical anatomical knowledge came from the daily study of those living patients who are recorded in the "books of crimes".  

Furthermore, the privilege of King John I in 1391 permitting the realization of regular autopsies every three years reflects the importance of orthodox medicine in the city. However, the first autopsy in Lleida was realized in 1385 and it is documented in the "books of crimes".         

The aim of this paper is to examine how university medicine touched a specific social reality, often related to people of low social rank, victims and assailants, protagonists of robberies, beatings, fights, rapes, murders... and was the usual way of knowing and exploring human anatomy.  

 

Guillem graduated in History fromthe University of Lleida. He is currently working on his PhD, with an scholarship from the University of Lleida,researching Lleida's medieval hospitals and their socials aspects from the conquest until the middle fifteenth century. He is a fellowship researcher of the consolidated research group "Espai, poder i cultura".

 

Mariana Rocha: INSEPULTO

The inexplicability of death comes as a repetition in my work. Our fragile body faces a rotting corpse as its double. Death represents a certain otherness, an unknowing to any discourse or text, and is inscribed into our self-understanding. This paper is a meditatio mortis, a reflection about the mortal matter of our bodies and the way I try to understand my own annihilation. Annihilation, time and putrefaction are the lines that suture this text. The flesh’s fear of rotting brings putrefaction as a key element to this writing and the cadaver as a melting double to remind us that we are a finite and dying creature.

My research deals with the ruin of the body and our condition as being toward death. Tied to my own future dead body, trying to be contemporaneous to my own death I performed reflections and exercises in different media, that helped me increase my comprehension and involvement with time, space and decay. There was always an effort to stop decay and bones were used as an important material along with bronze, bitumen and glass. I’m interested in the identification of the being with its matter, weight and transformation, and how we deal with our finitude. My body and the absence of it are the starting point of my inquiries.

 

Mariana is an artist, writer, performer, lawyer, and a PhD candidate in Literary, Musical and Visual Thought at The European Graduate School EGS (Switzerland). She has a BA in Fine Arts from Escola Guignard (UEMG/Brazil), specialized in drawing and sculpture; has a MA in Performance Art from Faculdade Angel Vianna (Brazil) and a MFA from Plymouth University (UK). After having worked for the State as a Homicide Prosecutor’s assistant, and deepened her forensic studies, as an artist she continues to research the body’s relation to death, weight and decay. Her work is interdisciplinary and has been shown in Brazil and abroad. She lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

 

Nuno Rodriques and Renata Alves; The Monastery of Santa Maria de Belém: An ideal mausoleum for a king or a pantheon for the last kings of Avis dynasty?

The Monastery of Santa Maria de Belém holds the pantheon of the last kings of the Avis Dynasty. It’s church was thought to be the tomb for King Manuel I, who ordered the construction. But the monarchs after him, turned it into the final resting place for the dynasty. This Monastery, though played a key role, both in the exaltation of memory and power of the dead kings, as well as an affirmation and legitimacy of the new monarchs and dynasties. The importance was such that the tomb models used in Belém for the kings in the 16th century, served as model for more than a century by the noble families across the country for their private funerary monuments. One king made a choice, a queen chose the funerary monument and most of the nobles of the kingdom, in devotion or in search for recognition by resembling the kings power, used the same model of funerary monument. In a interdisciplinar way, this theme moves from the history of death to art, explaining the importance that the ritual, the ceremonies and the funerary monuments, have for the understanding of a kingdom in the modern 16th century.

 

Nuno is a PhD student in History at  Faculdade de Ciências Socais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa Portugal.

 

Renata is studying for a History master's at at the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon) Portugal.

 

Amelia Rowe: Creative responses to death: developing understanding, meaning and conversations

‘The anatomist’s enthusiastic descriptions of the muscle’s point of insertion and the rotation potential of the given joint were important in my studies to become a speech pathologist. In the anatomy lab I was mesmerised by the strangely lyrical descriptions of body parts and their functions. I was attracted to all things shiny: the pins securing flaps of tissue, the bone’s smoothly ‘polished’ cartilaginous surface, the eerily reflective slabs. My notebook consisted of too many hasty drawing attempts. This experience should have been a clue that I was in the right place, studying the wrong course.’ (Notes from The Anatomy Lab – a personal reflection, Amelia Rowe.)

 

Fifteen years later and I am a visual artist, living and working in Tasmania, the smallest island state, south east of mainland Australia. Born from brief experiences in an anatomy lab, my art practice takes inspiration from the greatest equaliser, death. Curiosity about anatomy and physiology finds creative outlet in the taxidermy studio preparing non-human animals for sculptures. This paper outlines the profound influence and inspiration the dead (human and non-human) body is within my arts practice and how experiences have lead to the involvement in community projects specifically designed to inspire discussion about death and dying. This paper addresses the conference themes, Death and Art, through creative practice and community initiatives, highlighting the unique opportunities for sculptors exploring death as subject, narrative and inspiration in Tasmania.

 

Amelia is a visual artist working primarily within the field of mixedmedia sculpture and installation. Rowe’s art practice explores the complexities of human animaland non-human animal relationships. Inspirations include the modification of animals, the culture of preservation and traditions associated with mourning. In 2012 Rowe graduated from the Tasmanian College of the Arts, University of Tasmania with a Master of Fine Arts and is the recipient of several residencies and grants including a four-month residency during 2013 at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Rowe also teaches sculpture as a sessional lecturer at the Tasmanian College of the Arts.