Valérie Kobi Natural history and medicine encountered, early in their histories, an interesting paradox: although sciences of the living, they nonetheless relied on the study of inanimate specimens. The proper conservation of anatomical remains, both human and animal, posed an ongoing problem for centuries, meaning that artificial substitutes were often…
Amelia Rauser In the spring of 1793, a strange fad swept London: women began to wear belly pads under their dresses. Although no pads are known to survive today, a contemporary described one as “a linen bag, about the size and shape of a small pillow case… left open…
Eugenia Zuroski In A Description of the Villa… at Strawberry-hill, near Twickenham (1774), the catalogue of his famous collection, Horace Walpole lists among the contents of the Great North Bedchamber “a nautilus mounted in silver gilt, with satyrs and the arms of Paston” that once “belonged to the last earl…
Lihong Liu Fireworks in the early modern world paradoxically wedded a local experience of ephemeral sensations with an impulse to create patterns of perpetual motion. Exploring the custom of fireworks in China alongside their pictorial representations and decorative applications in a transcultural context during the long eighteenth century, this article…
David Mark Mitchell In her memoirs, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun recounted a 1792 viewing of anatomical wax models in Florence as an experience of both awe and horror. First, the detailed replication of complex anatomical mechanisms inspired the painter with reverence for the divine creator; then, a glimpse of…
Robert Wellington What spectacle offers he to our eyes? Is le Cercle alive? It looks like it breathes. Benoist, your ingenious art By a novel secret seems to animate the wax. I admire your rare talent; Your portraits, of an excellent taste, Cause extreme surprise One seems to see…
Charles Kang In 1794, Honoré Fragonard—cousin of the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard—returned to the Cabinet d’anatomie at the National Veterinary School in the Parisian suburb of Alfort.[1] He had previously worked at the school as a surgeon, anatomist, and preparer of anatomical specimens and models. This time, he was visiting…
Paris Amanda Spies-Gans On July 12, 1789, Parisians began to revolt. News had just arrived that France’s King Louis XVI had dismissed his trusted finance minister, Jacques Necker. Accordingly, in a contemporary print by Jean Baptiste Le Sueur, The Beginning of the French Revolution, the orator Camille Desmoulins advocates…