Book Description
The human body has long been central to Western art, and in order to represent the body in all its manifestations many artists have studied anatomy: dissecting the dead to better depict the living. The Quick and the Dead focuses on a range of artists, among them Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Albrecht Drer, William Hogarth, George Stubbs, Thodore Gricault, Kiki Smith, Joel-Peter Witkin, and Cindy Sherman to show the great richness and complexity that can result when art and science intersect. The drawings, prints, photographs, and objects in this book span five centuries and mark numerous cultural shifts, yet their imagery is as powerful today as when it was created. Bodily representation has shadowed Western art since the High Renaissance, particularly in the form of atlases of anatomical prints, detailed drawings, and wax cadavers used for teaching purposes. Studying anatomy was deemed so essential that it was part of the instruction program in the earliest Italian academies. Now contemporary artists interested in cultural constuctions of the body are reinvigorating the subject, with the fragmentation of human form being a prime concern. Since 1858, Gray's Anatomy has served to legitimize notions of "serious" science unchallenged by the frivolity of art. But in recent years a kind of rapprochement between medical history and cultural theory has occurred, and new medical technologies have become a wellspring for artists as well as for doctors. As The Quick and the Dead makes clear, the human bodysymbolic and intimate, material and sacredis a vital cultural resource and a site where various social constituencies find relevant meaning.


About the Author
Deanna Petherbridge is Professor of Drawing at the Royal College of Art in London and Curator of the National Touring Exhibition from the Hayward Gallery exhibition of The Quick and the Dead. Ludmilla Jordanova is Professor in the School of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Quick and the Dead, Artists and Anatomy explores the imagery of anatomical illustration, ranging from the macabre to the fantastical and from exquisite fine drawings to extraordinary prints of self-flaying bodies. Such work is rarely seen outside scholarly circles. The Quick and the Dead focuses on around 90 artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Albrecht Durer, William Hogarth, George Stubbs, Theodore Gericault, Kiki Smith, Joel-Peter Witkin and Cindy Sherman, and includes essays by Deanna Petherbridge and Ludmilla Jordanova.

FROM THE CRITICS

Journal of the American Medical Association