7KH7KHDWHURI$QDWRP\7KH$QDWRPLFDO3UHSDUDWLRQV

RI+RQRUH)UDJRQDUG
-RQDWKDQ6LPRQ

Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 36, Number 1, Fall 2002, pp. 63-79

(Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2002.0066

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ecs/summary/v036/36.1simon.html

Access provided by Chinese University of Hong Kong (9 Dec 2015 01:49 GMT)
 Simon / The Anatomical Preparations of Honoré Fragonard 63

T HE THEATER OF ANATOMY:
THE ANATOMICAL PREPARATIONS
OF HONORÉ FRAGONARD

Jonathan Simon

It is striking how many present-day debates reflect issues that were cur-
rent in the Enlightenment. In Body Criticism, Barbara Maria Stafford has pointed
to a shared concern about the effects of the techniques for anatomical visualiza-
tion. Comparing recent medical imaging technology with anatomical illustration,
she asks whether the “open-ended trend towards complete exposure [will] give
rise to the same sense of vulnerability, shame, and powerlessness that the eigh-
teenth century associated with anatomization.”1 In this essay, I want to address
the more specific question of the situation of the human corpse at the interface
between medical science and the public both in the eighteenth century and today.
In particular, I will be looking at the permanent anatomical preparations that
Honoré Fragonard (1732–1799) produced from human cadavers. These prepara-
tions are extraordinary achievements of technical virtuosity that, I will argue,
challenge our ability to read artifacts from the Enlightenment in contemporary
terms. While they would offend against many people’s sense of what is acceptable
in the presentation of real human cadavers today, they do not appear to have
done so two centuries ago. As in the issue of anatomical visualization, the ques-
tion of propriety in relation to the display of the dead has been raised quite re-
cently in the wake of new techniques for the permanent preservation of anatom-
ical preparations from real human bodies.
Körperwelten (Body Worlds), the public exhibition of “plastinated” hu-
mans by Gunther von Hagens in Mannheim in 1997–8, set off a debate over the
ethics of displaying real human corpses in a public educational context.2 The

Jonathan Simon is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in
Berlin. He is currently working on eighteenth-century French mineral collections, nineteenth-
century pharmacy, and postwar cancer chemotherapy.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 36, no. 1 (2002) Pp. 63–79.

64 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 36 / 1

criticisms raised on ethical grounds concerned the propriety of presenting ana-

tomical displays made from real corpses, the issue of propriety being intimately
related to the context of display. While no criticism was expressed over the dissec-
tion of corpses in the context of education in medical schools, the same rights of
access to the viscera of human beings were not taken to extend automatically to
the general public. According to the exhibition’s organizers, all the bodies in the
exhibition had been donated with the understanding that they would be prepared
and publicly displayed, but many commentators still considered the exhibition
unethical. As no obvious rules of ownership or informed consent were being bro-
ken, the way this criticism was expressed was somewhat oblique. Thus, Johannes
Reiter, a Catholic ethicist at the University of Mainz, condemned the exhibit in
the following terms: “He who styles human corpses as a so-called work of art no
longer respects the importance of death.”3 The implicit contrast is between the
preparation and display of a corpse with deliberate attention being paid to its
aesthetic effect and the appropriate reverent treatment of dead human bodies,
which, as I said, presumably does not exclude their dissection by or preparation
for students in the context of a formal medical education.
The problems that many people seemed to have with von Hagens’s Body
Worlds exhibition lie in a combination of aesthetic issues (aesthetics in the sense
of both the visual qualities of the exhibit and its ethical dimension) and questions
of access. The complaint against von Hagens was that the mise-en-scène of the
figures was in poor taste, although what characterized this lack of taste was never
spelled out. He replied that the presentation was at the same time artistic and
educational. What would presumably be an uncontroversial exhibit, were the
anatomical models made entirely out of synthetic polymers, becomes a moral
issue once it is known that the displays are made from human cadavers.
In order to mark the distinction between such contemporary displays
and the eighteenth-century figures that form the subject of this essay, I want to
point out two relevant changes in our relationship to death that have occurred
since the eighteenth century. The first is the relative rarity of seeing dead bodies in
the modern, industrialized world. While it is true that culturally specific mourn-
ing practices contribute to a wide variation in exposure to the corpses of relatives,
people in the modern world die less often in domestic or public spaces (except for
the morbidly attractive modern spectacle of the car crash). Thus, death is largely
confined to the hospital, where the corpses are not to be seen by anyone except
the medical staff.4 This brings us to the second point, which is the medicalization
of both disease and death over the past two centuries. With the rise of the effec-
tiveness of Western medicine, as well as the development of an exclusive and
dominant medical community across the nineteenth and particularly the twenti-
eth centuries, the medical profession has assumed dominion over the dead and
dying in the industrialized world. Thus, as can be seen in the debates over the
Body Worlds exhibition, it is usually left to physicians to decide how and where
those outside the medical profession can or should encounter the dead. Indeed,
one reason von Hagens is a particularly problematic figure is that he is a member
of the medical profession who has taken his “art” and his argument outside the
confines of the medical world.
 Simon / The Anatomical Preparations of Honoré Fragonard 65

This having been said, Body Worlds does have much in common with
traveling anatomical displays in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when an
explicit mission for public education served as a justification for combining ana-
tomical figures with the perennial spectacle of prodigious diseases and monsters.
Looking back to the eighteenth century, we can also find those who thought that
such exhibitions went too far and offended against public decency. In 1712, the
surgeon Guillaume Desnoües, who organized anatomical exhibitions that toured
the Paris region and were based on a collection of wax models, was condemned in
the following terms by the Parlement of Paris:
The Court, upholding the conclusions of the King’s Prosecutor General,
has commanded and commands that the aforementioned Desnoües can
no longer continue to make his Anatomical Demonstrations except in
plain daylight, beginning to let people enter at nine o’clock in the
morning & not letting anyone enter after 5 during the winter, and from
8 in the morning until 7 during the summer, & under the obligation to
exhibit publicly only those bodies from which the natural parts have
been removed, subject to a fine and the loss of his privilege.5

This passage leaves us to speculate which “natural parts” of the body had been
used to embellish the wax models, but judging by the moralizing tone of the
pronouncement and the need to limit the viewing times to daylight hours, it seems
likely that Desnoües was using titillating sexual details and perhaps real genitalia
to draw in the public. Whatever the details of Desnoües’s offense, his anatomical
exhibition was clearly seen as a threat to public morals. Nevertheless, it seems
that the educational value of the demonstrations meant that they could not be
banned outright.6
This sort of problem was no doubt regularly faced in eighteenth-century
Paris, as, with the public’s burgeoning appetite for science, private courses flour-
ished and many enterprising amateurs took advantage of the situation to pursue
profit, prestige, and—importantly—education.7 Indeed, those who could were
encouraged to investigate human anatomy firsthand.8 Such dissections were not
considered exclusively an element in the preparation for a medical career but
were to be thought of as offering an object lesson in natural theology, as the
famous anatomist Jean-Joseph Sue (the elder) explains:
In the process of dissecting, one searches through the entrails of Nature
herself, who becomes a book for us, & the impressions which stay with
us are infinitely more sensible than those acquired by other studies.
The object of anatomy is living Man
Its subject is the human Cadaver, or that of Brutes.
As all who give themselves up to this science are not heading
towards the same goal, one easily conceives that it is not limited to
people of the art: it suits Physicists, Theologians, Jurisconsults, &
almost anyone who is engaged in some liberal or mechanical profes-
sion.9

Thus, Sue encourages all those exercising a “liberal or mechanical” profession to

acquaint themselves firsthand with the viscera of their fellow human beings. The
dead body, particularly that of a person who did not die of natural causes, could
provide the French professional classes with a valuable experience they could not
66 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 36 / 1

find elsewhere. In the spirit of philosophical empiricism (and materialism), how

better to know the intimate nature of yourself and your fellow citizens than by
stripping one of them down systematically, skin, nerves, muscles, blood and lymph
vessels, and viscera, to arrive at the solid skeleton lying underneath?10
As either a supplement to or a substitute for the firsthand experience, the
same public should, of course, read Sue’s Abridged Anatomy of the Human Body,
where the parts of the body were presented in the same systematic fashion. Thus
we can already distinguish two human anatomies in circulation during the eigh-
teenth century: the practical anatomy derived from a suitably supervised dissec-
tion and the written anatomy, a systematic and precise description of the anatom-
ical systems laid open by expert dissection. In between these two, and linking one
to the other, lies the anatomical demonstration, in which the experienced surgeon
conducted a dissection before an audience, vicariously introducing them to the
world of human anatomy. Third, there were the illustrations that accompanied
such dissections, from Leonardo da Vinci via the works of Vesalius to those of
Albertus and d’Arconville (published under the name of Jean-Joseph Sue the young-
er). These illustrations have attracted the attention of many researchers, both
historians of medicine and historians of art.11 Fourth, there were anatomical
models. The best-known of these models today are those made out of wax—
exquisitely intricate and delicate objects that can be found in most historical med-
ical collections in the West and that continued to be produced throughout the
nineteenth century.12 Finally, there was another category of human anatomy, which
is the subject of the present paper: preparations from cadavers. Looking at the
work of Honoré Fragonard, the best-known eighteenth-century French producer
of such anatomical models prepared from real human subjects, I want to explore
how he managed the spectacle of the dead human body on display. Lessons in
medical anatomy, illustrations of artisanal virtuosity, and exercises in a distinc-
tive macabre aesthetic, Fragonard’s human preparations also participated in a
moral discourse, which was frankly sexual to an extent surprising in an age when,
as some historians have argued, the trend was toward containing sexuality within
private spaces.13
These preparations, like many other scientific objects, reveal contradic-
tory strains in Enlightenment culture, notably the tension between an ideal of
detached scientific knowledge and the spectacular, engaging nature of the scien-
tific productions themselves. The place of the human body in a society situated
between Christianity and humanism further heightens these tensions, introducing
moral and theological complications that mitigate against the possibility of a de-
tached regard, if such a regard were ever truly Fragonard’s intention. Heirs to the
Enlightenment, we are, I would suggest, heirs to the same contradictions that
accompany the profane displays of human bodies, which we continue to regard
as sacred in some deep sense. Thus, to an uncertain extent we share the voyeuris-
tic pleasure of our eighteenth-century forbears when confronted with exhibits of
this type. Nevertheless, I believe that the experiences are not in the same register,
as they are now informed by well-established norms governing the appropriate
appearance and modes of appreciation of scientific artifacts.14
The origin of such preparations from cadavers was rooted in the anatom-
ical demonstration. Indeed, it is important to bear in mind that anatomical prep-
 Simon / The Anatomical Preparations of Honoré Fragonard 67

arations ran the whole spectrum of permanence, from temporary accompaniments

to particular dissections that illustrated the mechanics of the human body by, for
example, injecting fluids into the arterial system, to permanent preparations fro-
zen in time, such as those produced by Fragonard. These permanent preparations
made from dead bodies shared at least two advantages with their more expensive
wax counterparts. First, they could serve as a permanent display of anatomy to be
consulted at any time, and second, they did not smell or decompose and so could
be conveniently incorporated into the private natural history cabinets of the anat-
omist’s more refined clients.
Permanent anatomical preparations from cadavers served to compensate
for the lack of corpses available for dissection. Whether this shortage was due to
administrative problems or to a profound popular fear of postmortem scientific
abuse of the human body, the fact had to be regularly confronted. Furthermore,
every medical educational establishment, whether public or private, needed a means
to teach anatomy, and preferably one that was not bound by the vagaries of sup-
ply from willing accomplices in hospitals or from grave robbers.15 Thus, learning
anatomy through models rather than fresh cadavers, or an economical combina-
tion of the two, constituted an indispensable resource for the amateur and medi-
cal student alike.
We know, for example, that for teaching comparative anatomy at the
Veterinary School in Alfort, the professor (a position occupied by Fragonard him-
self for six years) had at his disposal:
[F]resh pieces of anatomy, dried pieces, injections, moldings of natural
parts, drawings, models of bandages, instruments, a botanical garden,
all is collected here; the students have these objects constantly before
their eyes, and they are explained to them in the different courses to
which they have a bearing.16

Fragonard himself excelled in the art of preparing such “dried pieces”

from real cadavers (both human and animal), and I now want to explore the
history of the man and specifically his human preparations. Despite the celebrity
of his work at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries,
Fragonard is essentially a figure who has been rediscovered relatively recently.
There are now several publications about him available in French, although his
work remains unexplored in English.17 One of the problems for biographers and
commentators alike is that Fragonard published nothing during his lifetime and
left very few written traces behind him. However, he did leave some artifacts that
challenge our ability to understand the mentality of this eighteenth-century anat-
omist, as well as his relationship to the audiences that admired and even pur-
chased his preparations.
A brief biographical sketch should help in situating this remarkable “art-
ist” (in the ambiguous sense of artisan and creative aesthete) of the body, whose
career spanned the reign of two kings and the French Revolution.18 Born in Grasse,
near Cannes, in 1732, he was only three months apart in age from the painter
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, his cousin. Honoré Fragonard was apprenticed to a sur-
geon at the relatively late age of twenty-four and received his brevet in 1759,
entitling him to exercise this trade, although there is no evidence he ever did. Two
68 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 36 / 1

years later, Claude Bourgelat founded a veterinary school in Lyon and appointed
Fragonard as its director, a position he assumed while simultaneously occupying the
School’s chair of anatomy. Here, Fragonard started his prodigious production of
anatomical preparations, an activity he would continue for the next thirty years.
In 1765, Bourgelat (an avid equestrian and friend of Diderot, he contrib-
uted to the Encyclopédie on equine topics) was invited to found a royal veterinary
school in Paris on the model of the one in Lyon. Unable to procure a site equal to
his ambitions for the school within the city itself, Bourgelat eventually negotiated
the purchase of a château at Alfort, situated several miles to the east of Paris. The
château with its large grounds provided enough space for the School as well as
the experimental herds that would form part of its mission. Fragonard followed
Bourgelat to Alfort, where he was again appointed director of the School and
continued his preparations of both animals and humans, which would form a
sizeable part of the School’s anatomical cabinet. The reputation of this cabinet
grew and spread abroad. Thus, despite its distance from Paris, it attracted several
foreign visitors who have left invaluable contemporary descriptions of the collec-
tion. I will return to these accounts of the cabinet in what follows.
Fragonard spent six years teaching at Alfort before being dismissed from
his position in 1771 on the grounds of insanity (ascribed by Bourgelat to kidney
stones). Commentators on the affair usually attribute the incident to professional
rivalry. Michel Ellenberger, one of the more tendentious of Fragonard’s biogra-
phers, places the renown of the anatomical cabinet at the heart of the affair, claiming
that Bourgelat could not tolerate the fact that Fragonard and his cabinet were
better known than he himself was.19 After his dismissal, Fragonard was granted a
generous pension of one thousand livres a year and continued to produce his
anatomical preparations in Paris. Little is known about his professional life be-
tween his dismissal and his re-appearance on the public scene during the French
Revolution, but later documents suggest that he spent this time building up his
collection of preparations, some of which he sold to amateurs to furnish their
natural history cabinets.
Fragonard was re-introduced into the public world of anatomy in 1792,
when, together with Delzeuzes and Landrieux, he proposed a project for a na-
tional anatomical cabinet before the National Assembly. The project was reject-
ed, but Fragonard was subsequently named to both the Jury of the Arts (headed
by Jacques-Louis David and including his cousin Fragonard the painter) and a
temporary Commission of the Arts charged with the task of establishing the in-
ventory of anatomical cabinets across France. This undertaking took Fragonard
back to the collection at Alfort, where, along with Thillaye and LeClerc from the
Commission and in the company of Flandrin, his former student who now taught
at the Veterinary School, he drew up a list of the 3,033 items in the anatomical
cabinet. The Revolutionary government revived his career as a civil servant, rec-
ognizing his contribution to anatomy in 1795 by appointing him Head of Anato-
my at the new École de Santé. Although it is difficult to judge contemporary
status from Revolutionary appointments, it is clear that Fragonard spent the end
of his life not as a pariah, but as a respected member of the community of anato-
mists. He died four years later in 1799, almost seventy years old. We know that
he underwent an autopsy, but there is no evidence that his body was preserved.
 Simon / The Anatomical Preparations of Honoré Fragonard 69

What remains today of Fragonard’s work? Apart from some isolated an-
imal preparations to be found in museums around Paris, the bulk of his surviving
work is in the museum at the Veterinary School in Maisons-Alfort that now bears
his name.20 The outstanding piece in this collection, both for the intricacy of its
construction and for the drama of its mise-en-scène, is Fragonard’s horse and
rider (fig. 1), often associated in commentaries with the riders in Albrecht Dürer’s
Apocalypse. Judging from contemporary reports, the horse and rider had been
the centerpiece of the collection since its introduction. It was accompanied by
other human preparations, which were kept apart, it seems, from the general
collection of comparative anatomy. Looking at the illustrations of these prepara-
tions, the reader may see that they pose an important question of interpretation:
What are we to make of them? It has become a commonplace to say that such
anatomical preparations, in particular the wax anatomical models from the Flo-
rentine school of the eighteenth century or the French schools of the nineteenth
century, form a link between the worlds of art and science that are otherwise
considered distinct.21 Nevertheless, it is worth pushing beyond this dichotomy,
which once accepted inevitably draws us back to the frustrating and too often
circular task of defining these categories, whose retrospective application, as I
will argue, is fraught with the risk of anachronism. Rather, I believe that a more
positive approach is to recognize the multiplicity of functions that these objects
perform, and hence the numerous spaces they occupy. It is only at the intersection
between these multiple spaces (rather than at the more commonly cited cross-
roads of art and science) that we can begin to understand their apparently monstrous
appearance. With this in mind, I want to question Fragonard’s preparations with
respect to four categories: aesthetics, education, sentimentality, and sexuality.

MACABRE AESTHETICS

The modern viewer cannot fail to be struck by the distinctive appearance

of these preparations. Their baroque aesthetic recalls a genre of sculptures found
in churches that present an image of death as a reminder of mortality. Neverthe-
less, despite the overall style of Fragonard’s preparations, their status as memento
mori is not spelled out with the same literal insistence as it was by his seven-
teenth-century predecessors, such as Gaetano Zumbo working in wax, or, more
particularly, Frederik Ruysch. The latter was renowned for his baroque dioramas
made out of an assortment of human remains, which often featured Latin inscrip-
tions concerning the vanity of life.22
The distinctive appearance of Fragonard’s work is in large part due to the
preservation techniques used. The bodies had to be dissected and the muscle and
internal organs treated with solvents before being thoroughly dried. All the time,
these parts had to be carefully held in place so as not to deform the preparation.
The most striking parts of these preparations were the vascular and musculoskel-
etal systems, which can be seen quite clearly on the face and chest of the rider in
figure 2. The blood drains out of many of the veins and arteries soon after death,
and the veins in particular become flaccid and shapeless. To preserve these vessels
in a state approximating that of a living human, Fragonard first completely emp-
tied them of blood and then injected them with colored resins using a syringe.
Each anatomist had his own secret recipe for these liquids for injection, although
70 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 36 / 1

FIGURE 1. Horse and rider by Honoré Fragonard at the Fragonard Museum, École Nationale Vétéri-
naire d’Alfort, Maisons-Alfort, France. Photo by author.

in general they consisted of a mixture of wax and resins, using turpentine as a

solvent.23 The idea was to inject the mixture as a liquid and let it solidify in the
vessels, using a blue dye (usually azurite) for the veins and a red one (usually
vermilion) for the arteries to illustrate the functioning circulatory system. Never-
theless, the injection of the resin into the blood vessels unnaturally enlarged them,
giving an effect of swelling that is not found in the wax models, where the propor-
tions observed in the freshly dissected cadaver can be accurately reproduced. Fur-
thermore, in contrast to the neatly pinned-back skin of anatomical drawings or
wax models, the irregular sheets of dried and varnished muscle reinforce the im-
pression of a tortured body, flayed rather than dissected (see fig. 2). In this sense,
the pieces are reminiscent of many Christian images depicting the physical suffer-
ing of martyrs. This style is clearly distinct from the calm anatomical gaze of the
dissection theater as presented in the illustrated anatomy texts of William Smellie
or William Hunter, for example.24
In this sense, Fragonard’s preparations are reminiscent of the statues and
paintings of Saint Bartholomew or Marsyas flayed by Apollo, which served as
archetypal écorchés, rather than the more characteristic eighteenth-century ana-
tomical representations. Furthermore, the limitations imposed by the preparation
techniques themselves do not explain Fragonard’s deliberate selection of his mise-
en-scène, with the drama of the horse and rider evidently intended to impress its
audience just as much as the artful presentation of preserved anatomy (see fig. 1).
Whatever their aesthetic heritage, the primary role for these pieces was explicitly
meant to be as a teaching aid for the students at the Veterinary School, where
these preparations formed an integral part of a cabinet intended to help in the
teaching of comparative anatomy.
 Simon / The Anatomical Preparations of Honoré Fragonard 71

FIGURE 2. Detail of horse and rider (fig. 1). Photo by author.

ANATOMICAL EDUCATION

Although the anatomical detail in these preparations is impressive, it is

hard to see what exactly a student of comparative anatomy could have learned
from them, beyond the most general notions concerning the location of muscles,
arteries, veins, nerves, muscles, and ligaments. The bodily systems (circulatory,
lymphatic, nervous) are not presented with the same analytic logic or thorough-
ness found in the wax models. In wax, the elements of the relevant system could
be more easily separated out and could also readily be constructed based on ephem-
eral observations made on a fresh cadaver. In the horse and rider, for example,
myology and angiology are mixed in with neurology in the same parts of the
body, and when viewed from a distance, the details are quickly lost in the overall
conception of the piece, an effect only exaggerated by its dramatic staging. Fur-
thermore, the presentation of these pieces in glass-fronted cases did not lend itself
to student interaction. Rather, as in the case of the wax models, these prepara-
tions were simply too delicate to be handled.25
72 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 36 / 1

Rumpelt, the Chief Veterinarian for the Elector of Saxony’s Royal Sta-
bles, who visited the Alfort collection in 1779, had a somewhat different com-
plaint about the scientific standing of the preparations. For him, Fragonard’s major
fault was that he failed to demonstrate new discoveries in anatomy and seemed
content to display his mastery of the art of injection and preservation in ever
more elaborate projects. In the end, for Rumpelt, the anatomical cabinet at Alfort
was a triumph of artisanal virtuosity that left no place for true science. This is a
surprisingly modern sentiment; we are accustomed to a twentieth-century scien-
tific aesthetic that treats any embellishment of scientific instruments beyond the
functional minimum with an embarrassed pleasure, which finds its acceptable
expression in antiquarianism rather than in science itself. Rumpelt felt that the
collection at Alfort was too much geared toward providing an attractive spectacle
for a public that remained ignorant of innovations in anatomy—and thus that it
had gained renown at the expense of scientific interest.26 But Rumpelt was not
the only eighteenth-century visitor to Alfort. Indeed, in the 1795 report drawn up
by Fragonard and his colleagues, they specifically warn against the possibility of
theft in light of the large numbers of visitors to the collection. What did these
other visitors see in Fragonard’s work at Alfort?

SENSIBILITY: THE ROMANCE OF THE DEAD

Karl Rudolphi, a Swedish naturalist, who took a special detour from his
short trip to Paris to visit the collection in 1802, is our source for quite a different
side of Fragonard’s reputation. He tells how he had read in a travelogue that the
rider in the celebrated preparation of the horse and rider was Fragonard’s sweet-
heart, who had died of grief after her father, a local spice merchant, had refused
to give her hand in marriage to the anatomist. Fragonard had promptly dug her
up, prepared her and put her on the horse, or at least so the story went.27 To add
credibility to this tale, it was said that when asked about the rider, Fragonard
became melancholic. Rudolphi was quick to uncover the roots of the story in
local history and to point out with a certain delight that, on close examination, it
was clear that this young woman was in fact a young man, although his penis had
been partially amputated to seat him better on the horse. Rudolphi finishes this
story with the rather curious remark that the preparation was “tender enough”
(zart genug) to be presented to a woman.28
As I suggested earlier in this article when discussing von Hagens’s exhibi-
tion, the affective relationship between the public and the display is always an
important element in the public’s reaction to an exhibition featuring human body
parts taken from real corpses. Indeed, the sensibility associated with anatomical
displays was a central theme in the mythology of seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century anatomical collections, a key element being the lifelike nature of the prep-
arations. As Fontenelle recounts in his life of Frederik Ruysch, Czar Peter I was
moved to such a point by Ruysch’s preparations that “he tenderly kissed the body
of a small child—still lovable—who seemed to smile at him.”29 With Fragonard’s
horse and rider in mind, it is hard to believe that the “lifelike” appearance of
these preparations could engender a sentimental attachment like that ascribed to
the czar. Nevertheless, we can detect certain details in the commentaries of visi-
 Simon / The Anatomical Preparations of Honoré Fragonard 73

tors that suggest the affective appeal of these figures. The blue silk reins that the
rider held in his hands are remarked upon as an attractive feature. Furthermore,
there was an accompanying miniature version of the horse and rider, which Frag-
onard describes in his inventory as the “myology of a human fetus mounted on
the fetus of a donkey, holding the reins in its hands.”30 Probably the surviving
preparation that is the most shocking to modern sensibilities is the figure of the
dancing baby, a preparation of a fetus or young child that appears to be dancing
a jig for its audience (fig. 3). This is not, however, a figure to which visitors drew
any particular attention, so we can imagine that it was intended to have a similar
sentimental effect as that of Ruysch’s earlier preparations so beloved of the czar.

SEXUALITY AND THE MORAL DIMENSION OF

ANATOMY

Finally, I want to turn to another feature of the cabinet at Alfort that is

not commented upon by the foreign visitors: the sexual content of the displays.
There is a frank nudity in several of Fragonard’s human figures that is striking,
particularly in the Samson figure of the man holding the jawbone of a horse (fig.
4). The mise-en-scène licenses the presentation of the naked primitive, as does the
fact that it is an anatomical model. Nevertheless, this goes against a certain mod-
esty that one expects from late-eighteenth-century works of art. Ruysch, for ex-
ample, used to clothe his human preparations before placing them in jars, and
wax figures and anatomical illustrations were often cleverly contrived to hide the
external sexual organs.
It seems reasonable to suppose that the sexual content in the collection at
Alfort would have constituted at least a part of the collection’s appeal, just as the
story about the spice merchant’s daughter had piqued the interest of Rudolphi, an
otherwise sober cataloguer of collections. Apart from the complete, naked male
figures, Fragonard’s preparations of human sexual organs were placed among
those of the other animals, as would be expected in a display designed to illustrate
comparative anatomy, but were, it seems, presented with a supplementary moral
message. In the catalogue of the collection meticulously drawn up by Fragonard
in 1795, we find a detailed exposition of a woman’s reproductive anatomy that
pays particular attention to the signs of virginity. Thus, on the fourteenth glazed
table, there was an injected preparation of a woman’s reproductive organs includ-
ing the hymen, to which the note is added, “[T]his membrane is the indicator of
virginity, it is pierced in the middle.”31 Not only was there a mix of sexual educa-
tion and sexual moralizing, however; there was also a helping of sexual exoti-
cism. Under the glass of the table containing the human male reproductive organs
were two examples of unspecified, and hence presumably white men’s, genitalia,
as well as the reproductive organs of a “Negro.” While those of other animals
remain, the displays of human reproductive organs have disappeared, either trans-
ferred away from Alfort or removed from display by subsequent curators reluc-
tant to display such material. Nevertheless, none of these displays was a cause for
comment by the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century visitors to Alfort,
so we can assume that Fragonard did not offend against contemporary mores
with his displays.
74 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 36 / 1

FIGURE 3. “Dancing” baby at the Fragonard Museum. Photo by author.

FIGURE 4. Man (Samson?) holding a horse’s jawbone at the Fragonard Museum. Photo by author.
 Simon / The Anatomical Preparations of Honoré Fragonard 75

LOCATING FRAGONARD

It is, of course, hard to generalize about Fragonard’s audiences based on

FPO=69.9%
the few accounts that have come down to us from his contemporaries. Neverthe-
less, these records, combined with the artifacts themselves and a detailed invento-
ry of the anatomical cabinet at Alfort, allow us to draw some conclusions about
how Fragonard’s work fits into the world of eighteenth-century anatomical sci-
ence and spectacle. I also want to offer some comments on how he might fit into
the larger history of the display of human corpses. Thus, the conclusion is in two
parts, the first addressed specifically to Fragonard’s preparations and the second
taking on the more general questions of the display of corpses and the relation-
ship between science and art.
First, I want to pose two questions that relate to these preparations: Who
was the public for these works, and what were they intended to achieve? In an-
swer to the first question, it is worth insisting on the variety of audience suggested
by the sources. While the primary public for such preparations was intended to be
students of comparative anatomy, normally in pursuit of a veterinary career, the
appeal was obviously much wider. Rudolphi’s talk of the travelogue and rumors
circulating about the horse and rider suggest a public impressed by the sheer
spectacle of these preparations, although, of course, access would almost certain-
ly have been limited to the higher levels of society. Furthermore, Fragonard’s busi-
ness supplying private natural history cabinets suggests that the peculiar aesthet-
ics of his preparations found a hospitable reception in the refined circles of Parisian
amateurs.
As for the second question, the answer seems to be several things at once.
Of course, they were intended to exhibit his virtuosity in this difficult art—and to
impress in doing so. Furthermore, they were educational tools, used to instruct
students in comparative anatomy. But what of the dramatic mise-en-scène and
the macabre and sometimes moralizing tone of the work? This seems to be a part
of the anatomical model as spectacle, which was already in the process of being
divorced from the model as scientific representation.32 Thus, in terms of aesthetic
trends, I would suggest that Fragonard’s preparations are among the last such
baroque anatomical preparations and that they have two quite distinct descen-
dants that developed during the nineteenth century. On the one hand, there is the
display of bodies as pure entertainment and spectacle that is to be found in the
waxworks of John Christopher Curtius and Madame Tussaud. On the other, sci-
entific anatomy developed a more detached and sober style for its illustrations
and models, which was in turn extended to the preparations of human body parts.
We might also ask why people seem to be so interested in displays like
those of Fragonard and von Hagens. Do these exhibits, separated by more than
two centuries, exercise a universal morbid fascination that makes the display of
dead bodies irresistibly attractive to so many people? There must be some truth in
this, although I think it is clear from the different concerns that occupied visitors
to Fragonard’s cabinet and von Hagens’s exhibition that the experience is not the
same then and now. A much clearer distinction now exists between the sanc-
tioned educational use of prepared human material and its “gratuitous” display
as an art object or with the aim of popularization. Thus, it is easy to assume that
76 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 36 / 1

Fragonard’s public came either to learn some anatomy or simply to enjoy the
macabre spectacle, as this is the kind of distinction we readily draw today, but it
is not clear that it applies in this context.
This last observation brings us back to a question that is often posed with
respect to eighteenth-century anatomical works: Are Fragonard’s preparations
art or science? As I have already suggested in this paper, I think this is a mislead-
ing question. I want to answer it by pointing out what sets Fragonard’s works
apart from that of his contemporaries. Fragonard was not the only one to use
these techniques for preparing dry specimens, which had been used for probably
a century before him and continued to be used during the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, these kinds of preparations were mostly limited to specific organs
or parts of the body, rather than the full-body versions prepared by Fragonard.33
Indeed, this particular style of preparation seemed to have passed out of fashion
until its recent return with the perfection of plastination techniques and the work
of Gunther von Hagens. Once again, the reaction to this new form of the public
display of dead bodies suggests that we are now much more sensitive to the form
in which the bodies are displayed than were our eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury forbears. Over the last century or so, we have developed a clearer sense of
what is an appropriate objective style for scientific imagery.34 An example of
what seems to be an acceptable way to present dead bodies is the National Li-
brary of Medicine’s Visible Human Project, which represents real human ana-
tomical material in a minimal, photorealist style linked to elaborate scientific
methodologies. This seems not to offend against modern sensibilities in the way
that von Hagens’s artistically contrived plastinated figures do.35 Thus, if we ac-
cept the tentative claim that the “visible human” represents science and von
Hagens’s plastinated figures represent art, we can reformulate the question in the
following terms: Are Fragonard’s preparations closer to the Visible Human Project
or to von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibit? My answer would be that Fragonard’s
work is the direct ancestor of both. This does not mean, however, that Frago-
nard’s work is both art and science. Rather, it is a reminder that the distinction
between art and science in the context of anatomical preparations really became
clear only in the course of the nineteenth century.

NOTES
I would like to thank Christophe Degueurce for granting me permission to photograph Fragonard’s
work, as well as for an illuminating discussion about the collection. I heartily recommend a visit to
the Fragonard Museum, which is one of only a few Paris museums to have retained their nineteenth-
century allure. I would also like to thank the reviewer from Eighteenth-Century Studies for a useful
commentary to which I was able to offer only a partial response and Bernadette Fort for helping me
with the translation of antiquated German expressions.

1. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Med-
icine (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), 48.

2. The Körperwelten exhibition was at the Museum of Science and Technology in Mannheim
from 30 October 1997 to 1 March 1998 before moving on to Japan. Interestingly, a recent version of
this exhibition in Berlin included a preparation of a man on a horse as its centerpiece. Plastination
involves replacing a body’s water content with a polymer resin; see “http://www.plastination.com”
for more information.
 Simon / The Anatomical Preparations of Honoré Fragonard 77

3. Cited in Edmund L. Andrews, “Anatomy on Display, and It’s All Too Human,” New York
Times, 7 January 1998.

4. Images of dead people are not uncommon on television, particularly on news and current
affairs programs, but these images, however shocking they may be to some people, are necessarily
virtual corpses and not actual encounters with dead bodies.

5. Arrêt de la cour du parlement du 19 août 1712 (Paris, 1712). “La Cour faisant droit sur les
Conclusions du Procureur General du Roy, a ordonné & ordonne que ledit Desnoües ne pourra
continuer de faire des Demonstrations Anatomiques, qu’en plein jour, en commençant en hyver, à
laisser entrer à neuf heures du matin & ne laissant plus entrer personne aprés cinq heures, & en Eté
depuis huit heures du matin jusqu’à sept heures, & qu’à la charge de demonstrer publiquement que
les Corps, dont les parties naturelles seront supprimées, à peine d’amende & de décheance de son
privilege.” All translations in this essay are my own.

6. Only one year earlier, in 1711, Desnoües had exhibited his wax figures at the Paris Académie
des Sciences. See the entry under his name in E. J. Pyke, A Biographical Dictionary of Wax Modellers
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).

7. Michael Lynn has captured the enthusiasm of the Parisian bourgeoisie for the sciences in his
lively description of the Musée de Monsieur in “Enlightenment in the Public Sphere: The Musée de
Monsieur and Scientific Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32,
no. 4 (1999): 463–76.

8. Probably the most notorious work to offer this advice was Julian Offray de la Mettrie, L’Homme
machine (Leiden, 1747).

9. Jean-Joseph Sue, Abrégé de l’anatomie du corps de l’homme (Paris: Simon fils, 1748), 2–3.
“En disséquant, on fouille dans les entrailles même de la Nature qui nous devient un livre, & les
impressions qui nous en restent sont infiniment plus sensibles que celles qui sont acquises par les
autres études.
L’objet de l’Anatomie est l’Homme vivant.
Son sujet est le Cadavre humain, ou celui des Brutes.
Comme tous ceux qui s’adonnent à cette science, ne tendent pas tous à la même fin on conçoit
aisément qu’elle ne se borne pas aux personnes de l’Art. Elle convient aux Physiciens, aux Théolo-
giens, aux Jurisconsultes, & presqu’à tous ceux qui sont de quelque profession libérale ou méca-
nique.”

10. In a recent book on Renaissance anatomy, Roger French has explored this “know thyself”
tradition in dissection, which was adopted as the central theme for a recent exhibition at London’s
Hayward Gallery. See Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (New
York: Ashgate Publishing, 1999), and Martin Kemp and Marina Wallis, eds. Spectacular Bodies: The
Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
2000).

11. Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in
Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the
Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1987); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cam-
bridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990); and Ludmilla Jordanova, “Gender, Generation and Science:
William Hunter’s Obstetrical Atlas,” in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World,
ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), to cite but three exam-
ples from the history of medicine.

12. Perhaps the best recent work to come out on these wax models is Michel Lemire, Artistes et
mortels (Paris: Chabaud, 1990), which also includes a section on the work of Fragonard. See also
Michel Lemire, “Representation of the Human Body: The Colored Wax Anatomic Models of the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in the Revival of Medical Instruction,” Surgical and Radiolog-
ic Anatomy 14, no. 4 (1992): 283–91.

13. See, for example, Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:
Urizen Books, 1978), in particular chap. 9, “Changes in Attitude toward Relations between the
Sexes.”
78 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 36 / 1

14. Of course, there are deep historiographical problems associated with how we should “look”
at historical artifacts and how we might think about eighteenth-century audiences looking at them.
Ludmilla Jordanova offers a valuable discussion of this problem in the introduction to her Sexual
Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).

15. The most thorough treatment of this issue, although it concerns only the situation in Britain,
is Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

16. From a report by Flandrin and Huzard submitted to the Assemblée Nationale in 1790, cited
in A. Railliet and L. Moulé, Histoire de l’École d’Alfort (Paris: Asselin & Houzeau, 1908), 259,
“[P]ièces fraîches d’anatomie, pièces sèches, injections, parties naturelles moulées, dessins, modèles
des bandages, des instrumens, jardin botanique, tout y est rassemblé; les élèves ont ces objets con-
stamment sous les yeux, et ils leur sont tous expliqués dans les différents cours auxquels ils ont
rapport.”

17. Y. Poulle-Drieux, “Honoré Fragonard et le cabinet d’anatomie de l’École Vétérinaire d’Alfort

pendant la Révolution,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 15 (1962), 141–62; Pierre-Louis Verly, “Hon-
oré Fragonard Anatomiste, Premier directeur de l’École d’Alfort” (diss., École Vétérinaire d’Alfort,
1963); and Michel Ellenberger, L’Autre Fragonard: Son oeuvre à l’École Vétérinaire d’Alfort (Paris:
Jupilles, 1981).

18. The biographical information is drawn largely from Verly’s 1963 dissertation (see note 17).

19. Ellenberger, L’Autre Fragonard, 14.

20. The Fragonard Museum has an informative Website: http://www.vet-alfort.fr/fr/musee/

musee.htm

21. This has been the theme of several public exhibitions in the last ten years. One example is the
Âme au corps exhibition at the Grand Palais in 1993. See Jean Clair, ed., L’Âme au corps: Arts et
sciences, 1793–1993: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 19 octobre 1993–24 janvier 1994 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1993). More recently (19 October 2000–14 January 2001), the Hayward Gallery in Lon-
don has mounted an exhibition specifically on the representation of human bodies, called “Spectac-
ular Bodies.” See Kemp and Wallace, Spectacular Bodies.

22. For more on Zumbo (or Zombo) (1656–1701), see Maria Luisa Azzaroli Puccetti, Liberto
Perugi, and Paolo Scarani, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo: The Founder of Anatomic Wax Modeling,”
Pathology Annual 30 (1995): 269–81, and for more on Ruysch (1638–1731), see Antonie M. Luy-
endijk-Elshout, “Death Enlightened: A Study of Frederik Ruysch,” Journal of the American Medical
Association 212, no. 1 (1970): 121–5.

23. Reportedly, the greatest threats to such preparations were mites and other insects. Thus, it is
a credit to Fragonard’s material that it has survived for more than two hundred years, while other
collections have been eaten.

24. William Smellie, Set of Anatomical Tables (London, 1754); William Hunter, The Anatomy of
the Human Gravid Uterus (Birmingham, 1774).

25. It was this feature that led Felice Fontana to develop his wooden demountable figures that
allowed students to take the models apart and re-assemble them.

26. Cited in Verly, “Honoré Fragonard Anatomiste,” 17.

27. Karl Asmund Rudolphi, Bemerkungen aus dem Gebiet der Naturgeschichte, Medicin und
Thierarzneykunde auf einer Reise durch einen Theil von Deutschland, Holland und Frankreich (Ber-
lin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1805).

28. Rudolphi, Bemerkungen, 2:45, note.

29. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Éloges des académiciens (La Haye: Isaac van der Kloot,
1740).

30. Archives Nationales, Paris: F10 1294.

31. Archives Nationales, Paris: F10 1294.

 Simon / The Anatomical Preparations of Honoré Fragonard 79

32. In their book on the history of monsters, Daston and Park suggest that the Enlightenment saw
an end to the monster being viewed as a portent or wonder of nature and the beginning of its career
as exclusively an object of science. The corpse no doubt shared this trajectory to a certain extent.
Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York:
Zone Books, 1998).

33. There are several such nineteenth-century preparations in the Musée Delmas-Orfila in Paris.
The dry, permanent preservation of real organs received a new impetus with the introduction of
hardening polymers in the 1960s, which also allowed much more detailed corrosion preparations (in
which the organ is dissolved away from around the injected vessels) of the complex vascular systems
of such organs as the liver and kidney. See the special edition of Surgical and Radiologic Anatomy
17, suppl. 1 (1995).

34. For a discussion of the grounds of such objectivity, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,
“The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (1992): 81–128.

35. The Visible Human Project can be found by following the links from the National Library of
Medicine Website (http://www.nlm.nih.gov). Evidently, this is not a strict parallel, as the Visible
Human Project consists of data taken from a body that has since been destroyed. For some back-
ground on the project, see José Van Dijck, “Digital Cadavers: The Visible Human Project As Ana-
tomical Theater,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences
31, no. 2 (2000): 271–85.