GLR May-June 2025

Beautiful Corpses

A SINEWY MAN stands erect with a serene gaze. He has a massive book propped against his muscular left thigh and he appears to have a toga draped around his body. As I approach this statue (standing in a corner of the chapel of the University of Milan), I realize that he is not just well defined. Those are actually his muscles and that’s his own skin he’s bearing. In his right hand he holds what remains of a

illustrations. These, like the flayed St. Bartholomew, are beautiful and bizarre: people are depicted in life-like poses draw ing back their skin to reveal musculature, internal organs, or even a fetus in situ ! Sappol’s work is lavishly illustrated, deeply scholarly, yet very approachable. It represents a skilled weaving of art history, history of medicine, and queer studies. The anatomical images he presents are highly peculiar—just one of the many connota bodies are an act of pure artistic fantasy. More generally, anatomical illustrations (even of the monochrome type) do not correspond to what I experienced in Gross Anatomy class. At first encounter, a corpse is gross . Medical students com pensate with pranks, cadaver pet names, and other gallows humor. (Sappol dis cussed this in his 2004 book A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America .) I spent a year with the pungent smell of formaldehyde and, by summer, of melting fat. All the tissues are a mon otone taupe. All the innards are covered in fat, sinew, and connective tissue. Where were the distinctive colors of the cleanly outlined organs, nerves, and blood vessels shown in my dissection manual? However, as the year pro gressed, the medical student’s eye be came trained to find order and discover the magnificent construction of the body that illustrators portray. Any reader who’s not vegetarian will have butchered a whole chicken, or carved a turkey, and marveled at the construction of these bodies. In the surgical theater, even more so, the wielder of the scalpel has to envi

V ERNON R OSARIO

QUEER ANATOMIES Aesthe ti cs and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700–1900 by Michael Sappol Bloomsbury Visual Arts. 260 pages, $29.95

tions of “queer” he uses. My main theoretical criticism of the work is that he has so many applications of “queer” that finally everything is queer and the word is almost vacated of meaning. More on this later. The mannered, dramatic, or whimsical poses of the dissected

knife; in fact, the one used to flay him. This is St. Bartholomew the Apostle who, legend has it, was martyred by being flayed alive. This is a copy of the 1562 écorché by Marco d’Agate in the cathedral in Milan. It was a fortuitous and startling en counter at the time when I was reading Michael Sappol’s Queer

sion the idealized forms through the blood and cautery smoke. I have to admit that I became a psychiatrist to avoid the grossness of the human body and instead focus on the alternative fantasies of neuropsychiatric physiology. I imagine some readers will be repulsed by these images. Sappol opens with a “trigger warning,” and not just because they may be off-putting. He will be pushing us to see their æs thetic seductiveness and, more specifically, their homoerotic ap peal (another couple of instantiations of “queerness”). The

Anatomies: Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700 to 1900 . Sappol is a cultural historian, a former curator and scholar-in-residence at the National Library of Medicine, and currently a visiting researcher at the Uppsala University, Sweden. Although Sappol’s time frame is post-Renaissance, he cannot help but include several early 17th-century anatomical Vernon Rosario, MD, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, is the author of The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity . 40

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