For centuries, anatomical art has brought the dead to life in striking images, as alluring as they are disturbing.
It depicts the body in meticulous detail: skin, bones, muscles, organs. But these drawings can also expose much more than organs.
Surgical art offers a tantalising glimpse into the tastes and desires of the artists who shaped our understanding of the body today. They drew from society’s most undesirable: the poor, sickly, marginalised and incarcerated, both victims of murder and their killers. Whose bodies were used? Who decided how they were depicted? And what do these drawings tell us about the societies that made them?
Beneath the Sheets offers an intimate look into Thackray Museum of Medicine’s extensive anatomical artwork collection. Across centuries of printed pages, we meet anonymous models turned into muses, classical nudes repurposed as teaching aids, and bodies opened up for inspection – all in the name of scientific progress.
Central to this show is the work of anatomical master Joseph Maclise (1815–1880), in his seminal atlas Surgical Anatomy (1851). Using bodies from the Parisian morgues, Maclise’s highly skilled illustrations rendered the corpses of handsome young men into detailed, lifelike portraits. Pensive, moody, sometimes flirtatious, his poised figures recall the classical ideals of Renaissance art, celebrating the human form in all its complexity and beauty.
We will also shine a light on some of the stories left in the margins: the women and people of colour who were objectified, dissected, or displayed, yet rarely given a voice. For the first time, audiences can see was it thought to be the only Black body in any Victorian anatomical atlas, drawn by Maclise. The illustration was removed from the 1851 US edition of his book Surgical Anatomy with American audiences judged unready for black and white bodies placed on an equal footing.
Thackray Museum of Medicine have commissioned a new film by the queer interdisciplinary artist Marlowe Mitchell, whose work explores the intersections between race and gender in archival material; which bodies have been othered, and which bodies have been excluded altogether.
Provocative. Beautiful. Unsettling. Beneath the Sheets asks us to confront the human realities that gave us our understanding of the body that medicine has today, one page at a time.
Type of event: Exhibition