Jack Gann
@jackgann
Historian and curator. Museums, Victorians, and medicine. Currently curator at Thackray Museum of Medicine, Leeds
She wanted a holiday in the sun. But only because it was the best vantage point to see it disappear behind the moon.
Staying on brand with my summer holiday poolside reading of neo-Victorian mushroom gothic.
On a similar note, I've no idea what they use to make an already potato-based product taste of mash (as in the "estilo inglés" - bangers and mash crisps).
On the front page of today's Yorkshire Post, sitting in a big plant pot with an incredibly rare 300 year old book.
Opens today. A new exhibition inviting children to explore the magic of the plant world, in collaboration with the RHS.
Our anatomy exhibition closes today, but it has lasted a lot longer than one past exhibition on a similar theme. In 1860, Leeds had the dubious honour of hosting the first museum to be forcibly closed for exhibits that violated the Oscene Publications Act.
We have a copy currently on display in our Anne Lister exhibit. Lister wrote that reading Aristotle's Masterpiece (in a copy confiscated from a maid) left her "in a high state of excitation". Historian Anna Clark suggests the book was the origin of Lister's knowledge of the clitoris.
Toy Company: At long last we have created the Chattermax from classic Bluey episode 'Don't Create a Chattermax'
Inspired by our inclusion of this suggestive image of Burke and Hare victim Mary Paterson in the Beneath the Sheets exhibition. What the video edit didn't include was the bit where I said that we don't actually know if it's a picture of her.
Also, because it's from the period in the 90s in which I Spy books were published by Michelin Travel Publications, the illustrations for "I Spy: Ghosts, Mysteries & Legends" just insert the Michelin Man into every scene. The terror of this haunting moment!
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in 'I Spy on the Motorway'"
A holiday in the woods means 5 year old enjoying the age old pleasures of an "I Spy" book. And me enjoying the retro delights of the series' most idionsyncratic entry.
This election very much an underwhelming choice about who's got the least misguided views.
Five year old is considerably less excited by a new dinosaur at the Natural History Museum than daddy is.
Our new exhibition is the first time I've curated something as a linear chronology. But a circuit round a room is not just a straight line, so I made sure we begin and end with the same image: one of the muscle men from Vesalius's 1543 Fabrica, showing up again in the 2001 New Atlas of Human Anatomy
Popular adult craft too (some very wild and wacky takes on what should be on all the anatomical flaps here)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
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).
As it's Valentine's Day: my favourite anatomical illustrations of hearts from the museum collection...