Anatomica discusses how for centuries, humankind has sought to know itself through an understanding of the body, in sickness and in health, inside and out. This fascination left in its wake a rich body of artworks that demonstrate not only the facts of the human body, but also the ways in which our ideas about the body and its proper representation have changed over time. At times both beautiful and repulsive, illustrated anatomy continues to hold our interest today, and is frequently referenced in popular culture. 

Anatomica brings together some of the most striking, fascinating and bizarre artworks from the 16^th through to the 20th century, exploring human anatomy in one beautiful volume. 

About the Author:

Joanna Ebenstein is an internationally recognised expert in the art of anatomy and creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series. Her books include Death: A Graveside Companion and The Anatomical Venus both for Thames and Hudson.

The ultimate death compendium, featuring the world's most extraordinary artistic and ethnographic objects concerned with mortality, allied to text by expert contributors

Death is an inevitable fact of life. Throughout the centuries and around the world, humanity has sought to come to terms with this sobering thought through art and ritual.

A volume of unprecedented breadth and sinister beauty, Death: A Graveside Companion examines a staggering range of cultural attitudes to death within seven themed chapters. Nineteen experts contribute thought-provoking essays on specific aspects of humanity’s cultural legacy of ideas concerning death. The essays are followed by gallery pages presenting a breathtaking variety of death-related imagery drawn from every major culture, from Neolithic China and Bronze Age Mexico to medieval Germany, 18th-century Nepal and 20th-century France.

From catacombs, crypts and bone-pits to reliquaries, embalmings and mummies, and from memento mori, vanitas and danse macabre to vernacular tokens, found photography and curios from bygone rituals, this astonishing compendium features more than 1,000 images and incorporates high art, kitsch and all points in between.

With a foreword by Will Self and featuring never-before-published photographs of many of the wide-ranging and eclectic art, artifacts and ephemera found in the Richard Harris Art Collection, Death: A Graveside Companion is a book like no other, packed with morbid inspiration and macabre insights to take to the grave.

Contents List:

1. The Art of Dying • 2. Examining the Dead • 3. Memorialising the Dead • 4. The Personification of Death • 5. Symbolising Death • 6. Death as Amusement • 7. The Dead After Life

About the Author:

Joanna Ebenstein is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, writer, lecturer and graphic designer. She runs the Morbid Anatomy blog and website, and founded the Morbid Anatomy Museum. Ebenstein photographs, curates and collects artefacts, images and texts relating to curious collections, early museums and cabinets of curiosity, collectors and collecting, medical museums and museums of natural history. She is the author of Death and The Anatomical Venus.

Deftly crafted dissectable female wax models take centre-stage in this disquieting volume for fans of the macabre, the ghoulish and medical history

Beneath the original Venetian glass and rosewood case at La Specola in Florence lies Clemente Susini’s Anatomical Venus (c. 1790), a perfect object whose luxuriously bizarre existence challenges belief. It – or, better, she – was conceived as a means to teach human anatomy without the need for constant dissection, which was messy, ethically fraught and subject to quick decay. This life-sized wax woman is adorned with glass eyes and human hair and can be dismembered into dozens of parts revealing, at the final remove, a tranquil foetus curled in her womb. Sister models soon appeared throughout Europe, where they not only instructed the specialist students but also delighted the general public.

The Anatomical Venus is a celebration of these female wax models and reveals their evolution from wax effigy to fetish figure and the embodiment of the uncanny. Today, these images trouble the edges of our neat categorical divides between life and death, science and religion, body and soul, effigy and ecstasy, spectacle and education, kitsch and fine art. Skilfully written by a curator of the macabre, the beautiful and the spiritual, this is a meticulously illustrated survey of these anatomical odalisques and the cultural and artistic intersection they inhabit.

About the Author:

Joanna Ebenstein is an internationally recognised expert in the art of anatomy and creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series. Her books include Death: A Graveside Companion and Anatomica.