#joanna ebenstein

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Book 473

Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy

Dr. Pat Morris with Joanna Ebenstein

Blue Rider Press / Penguin Random House 2014

Born in Bramber, Sussex, England in 1835, Walter Potter (d. 1918) grew up in the family inn/pub, The White Lion. He left school at the age of fourteen and began trying to come up with ways that his naturalist/taxidermy hobby could help encourage business at the pub. At the age of 19, inspired by his younger sister’s collection of nursery rhymes, Potter started creating his first major tableu, The Death and Burial of Cock Robin—a work that would take him seven years to complete. Housed within a wooden house-shaped case nearly two yards wide, Cock Robin features 98 birds, a small handmade bull, butterflies and other insects, and even a snake—artfully arranged in a solemn mourning scene down a path leading into a church. Some of the mourners are even crying glass tears. The work delighted the Victorian sensibility.

Eventually, Potter opened a museum to house his work and over the course of his life would create, among numerous smaller pieces, at least a dozen large tableaux with titles like: The Kittens’ Wedding (c. 1890), Rabbits’ Village School (c. 1888), The Upper Ten (c. 1880), depicting a squirrel card club, and The Lower Five (c. late 1800s), a scruffy rats’ den being raided by local police (also portrayed by rats).

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From the Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic by Joanna Ebenstein 

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Daily Vibe: 🖤

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Santo Niño Cieguito or The Holy Blind Child: Folk Saint of Puebla, Mexico

Santo Niño Cieguito started his life as an ordinary Niño Dios (albeit one with emerald eyes) in the arms of a statue of the Virgen las Misericordias (Virgin of Mercy) at a convent of the same name in Valladolid, Morelia. On August 10, 1744, a man attended mass and hid in the church after it closed in order to rob it. Around midnight, he began his work. But when he approached the statue of Mary to steal her jewelry, "the evildoer heard deep in his conscience the cry of a child that seemed to come from the image of the child Jesus."

The man covered the child's mouth to stop its cries but, still feeling its gaze, he threw it into his sack. He fled to a mountain hideaway, but the child continued to cry. When he tried to remove the Niño's emerald eyes, it shed tears of blood.

When the church fathers realized the robbery had taken place, they called the authorities, who were able to track down the thief and recover the stolen goods. The perpetrator made a full confession, and reported the miracle he had witnessed. When the Niño was returned to the temple, the father superior sent him to the Capuchin Convent in Puebla for restoration and protection.

The abbess of this convent decided not to replace the eyes, but to leave his eye sockets empty in respect for the miracle of the crying of the blood. The statue was given the name Santo Niño Cieguito, The Holy Blind Child, and adorned with the symbols of the passion of Christ, hair, a crown of thorns, a cross, and a tray with two eyes commemorating his desecration and the outrages to which he had been subjected.

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For over ten years, artist, writer, and curator Joanna Ebenstein has been excavating the places where death and beauty meet through her blog Morbid Anatomy. In her “Diskant Memorial Lecture: Beauty and the Macabre,” she searches for both in our collection of European art. Join us on Oct 27 in the Perelman Building Auditorium from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. 

$20 (members free); includes Museum admission. Reception to follow. This lecture is supported by The Robert and Eda G. Diskant Memorial Endowment.

“Vanitas,” 1661, by N. L. Peschier 

[popsixsquishcicerolipschitz]

BBC Culture

Why these anatomical models are not disgusting

by Fiona Macdonald

26 May 2016

Nightmares in wax

A tiny foetus, its foot kicking out of a womb; an intestine piled up next to a lifeless figure, her torso ripped open from the string of pearls on her neck to her abdomen. Our natural reaction is to recoil with disgust, to dismiss these eerie waxworks as freak show objects. Yet to do so is to misunderstand them, says the author of a new book. “They do say something different to us today from what they meant at the time,” says Joanna Ebenstein, co-founder of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in New York. Her book The Anatomical Venusreveals how a figure that provokes an uneasy reaction in viewers now was once a popular tool for instruction. This Anatomical Venus, produced by the workshop at La Specola in Florence between 1784 and 1788, is displayed in her original rosewood and Venetian glass case at the Josephinum, Vienna, Austria. (Credit: Josephinum, Collections and History of Medicine, MedUni Vienna/Photo Joanna Ebenstein)

[archivist-dragonfly]

Book 404

Death: A Graveside Companion

Joanna Ebenstein, ed.

Thames & Hudson 2017

In 2007, Joanna Ebenstein created the Morbid Anatomy blog, dedicated to “surveying the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture,” to support a photo exhibition. The blog, which grew to include—among other things—a library, lectures, exhibitions, classes, and books, even led to the founding of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in 2013 (which sadly closed in 2016). This amazing book features 1,000 illustrations from the Richard Harris Art Collection, a private collection of over 3,000 objects surrounding the theme of death and dying. In seven chapters exploring different aspects death, this book is a historical treasure trove of rare and macabre delights. My only complaint about this book is that the text, which is printed in a rust color on a charcoal background, is a bit difficult to read.