Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus by Joanna Ebenstein - ISBN: 9780262046039
Hardcover
Anatomist’s strange, beautiful, and unsettling art blurs science, religion, and mortality.

Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus

A Morbid Guide

$79.11

  • Hardcover

    224 pages

  • Release Date

    20 September 2022

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Summary

A lavishly illustrated guide to the magnum opus of the great seventeenth-century anatomist, master embalmer, artist, and collector of specimens.

Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful sp…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780262046039
ISBN-10:0262046032
Author:Joanna Ebenstein
Publisher:MIT Press Ltd
Imprint:MIT Press
Format:Hardcover
Number of Pages:224
Release Date:20 September 2022
Weight:1.24kg
Dimensions:254mm x 203mm x 1mm
What They're Saying

Critics Review

“this is an astonishing book, which is both a wonderful artistic and scientific treat.” - Leonardo

“The new translation is buttressed with essays from Ebenstein’s expert collaborators—anatomical practitioners, curators, historians of art and science—and a generous, if challenging, selection of images, featuring engravings of the famous tableaux and photographs of the original cabinets and surviving wet specimens in their jars. All these combine to resurrect Ruysch’s collection and to recover a sense of his idiosyncratic curatorial style: a combination of anatomically precise annotations and wistful memento mori epitaphs, seasoned with P.T. Barnum levels of boosterism and denunciations of his rival anatomists.”
–New York Review of Books

“This is an astonishing book, which is both a wonderful artistic and scientific treat.”
–Leonardo

About The Author

Joanna Ebenstein

Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, photographer, and graphic designer. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library, and event series and cofounded the now-shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum.

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