Anatomy, Art, and Crucifixion

As pointed out in my last post, artists were among the first to study anatomy of the human body, in order to portray it accurately. By the late 18th century, some artists, informed by anatomical study, were questioning traditional artistic depictions of the crucifixion of Christ, such as these by Mantegna and Masaccio. 

In 1801, three British artists, two painters, Benjamin West and James Cosway, and a sculptor, Thomas Banks, set out to test their belief in the inaccuracy of most depictions of the crucifixion. They were able to experiment using the corpse of an executed murderer, James Legg. At the time, the bodies of executed felons were the only legal source of "subjects" for anatomists, or in this case artists. 

The artists took the body of Legg from the gallows and nailed it to a cross, and flayed it. The gruesome result is shown in the picture below, taken when Legg was on display at the London Museum a few years ago. The experiment, however unpleasant, did show that traditional depictions of the crucifixion were anatomically incorrect.

Interestingly, an amazingly similar picture can be found in an illustration by the French artist Jacques Gamelin more than twenty years earlier (1779).  Did Gamelin try the same experiment? Were the British artists influence by Gamelin? If anyone knows, I'd love to hear.

Anatomy Illustrated, Vesalius to Body Worlds

Anatomists long depended upon artists to illustrate their texts. They weren't always happy with the results. British surgeon John Bell (1763-1820) complained about "the subjection of anatomical drawing to the capricious interference of the artist, whose rule has too often been to make all beautiful and smooth, leaving no harshness."  

Bell illustrated his own works, such as The Anatomy of the Human Body. They are certainly harsh enough, but they also show that he was a talented artist with a developed aesthetic sense. Here is an example:

The ropes around the dissected corpses' necks remind the viewer that until the nineteenth century, anatomists were largely dependent upon the bodies of executed criminals for subjects to dissect. Legal, subjects, that is. They had other sources, but that's another story, told elsewhere in this blog.

The connection of dissection with criminal bodies, especially the bodies of murderers, is evident as early as 1543, in Andreas Vesalius' seminal work, On the Fabric of the Human Body. 

Anatomical illustrators also connected dissection to religious themes, perhaps a way to justify their grisly work. The illustrations sometimes served as memento mori, or reminders of mortality, as in these images from Vesalius and a work by Bernard Albinus (1747).

Artists were among the first to study anatomy of the human body, in order to depict it accurately in religious and historical paintings, such as Christ on the Cross. Anatomical illustrations such as this by artist Jacques Gamelin (1779) reflect the tradition. 

Bell may have disliked this sort of thing, but perhaps not. It may be artistic. It certainly isn't soft. Bell probably found the work of Frederik Ruysch (1744) more objectionable, festooned as it is with carefully posed skeletons of infants.

Bell surely disliked Jacques D'Agotys 1773 text on on female anatomy. The calm look of the pregnant woman looking back at the viewer is a characteristic pose of 18th-century French painting, but jars with what is seen below her head, and it isn't terribly helpful from an anatomical or surgical perspective. 

The illustration of a woman giving birth was probably even more objectionable to Bell, with it's dreamy, messy, unrealistic, almost modernistic style.

Bell surely admired the illustrations in William Hunter's Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774), a work on the female anatomy in the final stage of pregnancy. Hunter demanded that his illustrator represent "only that which is actually seen" which he argued, would carry "the mark of truth" and be "almost as infallible as the object itself." The following illustration from Hunter's book conveys the stark nature of what he was aiming for. Much like inspecting a butcher shop.

From the mid-19th century, photography and other modern methods of presenting images largely did away with the need for traditional anatomical illustrations. Today, even the general public can view every aspect of human anatomy through the preservation of actual human bodies, as in Gunther von Hagens' exhibition, Body Worlds. One wonders what Bell would have thought of it.

London's Great Stinks, Cholera, and John Snow

Between 1800 and 1860, London's population grew from 1 to 3 million. Sanitation lagged far behind growth. Wells were contaminated by overflowing and leaking privies. Streets were full of human and animal wastes. 

The River Thames was a giant sewer, fed by the smaller sewers under the streets. It was also the major source of drinking water, as illustrated in George Cruikshank's cartoon of 1832.

By mid-century, the river had become so, pardon me, shitty, that summers were often marked by what were called "Great Stinks." The stinks sometimes coincided with severe cholera oor typhoid epidemics. 

During the cholera epidemic of 1849, surgeon John Snow argued that cholera was spread through foul drinking water. In 1855, he demonstrated it through a pioneering epidemiological investigation of cholera deaths in one neighborhood in Soho, where most victims had drunk water from a pump on Broad (now Broadwick) St. 

(Image: John Snow)

Few people paid much attention to Snow's work at the time but lots noticed the evil stink of the Thames. Scientist Michael Faraday, wrote to the  Times pointing out the necessity of cleaning up the river. The whole of the river, he said, was an opaque brown fluid, a "fermenting feculent sewer." 

The satirical magazine Punch published the cartoon below of Faraday introducing himself to a crap-covered god of the river, Father Thames.

  

Nothing happened then, but three years later, in the summer of 1858, another Great Stink aroused Parliament to action. The parliament building was right next to the river and the MPs found the smell intolerable. They passed an act to lay a new sewer system dumping wastes in the country instead of the river. 

Within a few years the Thames was much cleaner, and the health of London's population improved. Punch saluted the improvement with a cartoon of Father Thames cleaned up, robust, and dressed as a Beefeater, being greeted by Prince Albert. 

London's Wapping District: A Great Place to Hang in London

Wapping is not one of London's districts crammed with tourists, and that is one of the best things about it. One can stroll about unimpeded by the gawking crowds at the nearby Tower of London and have the gawking to oneself. But there are other good things as well. Wapping was once a bustling port area dominated by wharves and warehouses and trades catering to the seafaring world: chandlers, inns, pubs, dosshouses, and doxies. 

Wapping was heavily bombed in World War II and the docks, unable to handle the large ships of the late 20th century, closed in the 1960's. The area was largely derelict until major redevelopment began in the 1980's. Wapping is now a rather fashionable place, especially near the waterfront, what with the marina, restaurants, and shops of St Katherine's Docks nearby, and its proximity to the financial districts of the City and Canary Wharf. 

The low taverns and brothels may be gone along with the ships and sailors, but the layout of the streets, the warehouses, and a few pubs retain some of the feel of those days. Many of the warehouses have been converted into apartments. The cranes that once hauled goods from ships often remain on the buildings, reminding one of their former purpose. Old stairs lead down to the river at various points along the waterfront. They were used by watermen who ferried people across the river or to ships, and were known as "watermen's stairs." 

The waterside is also home to several inviting pubs with good views of the river. Two of them The Prospect of Whitby and The Town of Ramsgate, claim to be the oldest pubs on the river. 

The Prospect of Whitby boasts the longest pewter bar in Europe and an upstairs room named for Samuel Pepys, the famous 17th century diarist, who used to frequent the place. Another pub, The Captain Kidd, is named for the famous alleged pirate who was hanged nearby at Execution Dock in 1701.

The Prospect and the Captain Kidd both feature hanging ropes outside, to get you in the right mood for celebration.

This Church is a Film Star: London's St. Bartholomew's

The Church of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London is probably familiar to you.  Even if you have never been there in person, you almost surely have seen it on the big or little screen. It has been used in many popular films and TV shows, including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, Amazing Grace, The Other Boleyn Girl, Richard II, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. 

The church's stardom helps explain why it was the first parish church in England to charge tourists an entrance fee.  For a parish church it is quite large, which may explain its attraction to film-makers. Being in the heart of London doesn't hurt either.

The church, which stands just to the south of the famous meat market of Smithfield, dates from 1123, when a man of some wealth named Rahere, founded the Priory of St. Bartholomew, with an attached hospital. Rahere had recovered miraculously from a fever while on a pilgrimage to Rome, and in a dream the saint instructed him to set up a monastic foundation, or so said Rahere. 

The hospital, the oldest in London, is next door inside a high wall. The wall contains a memorial to William Wallace, Braveheart, who was executed for treason nearby, one of many people who met that fate here, including the heretics/martyrs burned under Bloody Mary. 

A statue of Henry VIII, father of Bloody Mary and Elizabeth I, stands over the entrance gate to the hospital, legs splayed, looking very kingly indeed. The statue was his reward for dissolving the monastic foundations and giving the hospital to the City. 

Since Henry’s time the hospital has been a secular establishment, known affectionately as “Bart’s.”  Another interesting and just as old church sits inside the hospital walls known as St. Bartholomew the Less. The “Less” is not a put-down, but was coined to distinguish it from its larger namesake nearby. Both are part of the same parish of the Church of England today.

How convenient. In one little place, you might be cured of illness (not likely), executed (more likely), and given the necessary rites to speed your way to heaven (unlikely).

Just to the south of Bart's Hospital lies the former site of London’s notorious Newgate Prison, now replaced by the Central Criminal Court. But that is another story.

London's Cock Lane, Where the Great Fire Ended.

Don't get too excited. Cock Lane was named for the male chicken. But it is a place of considerable interest. It was here that the Great Fire of London of September 1666 was finally stopped, or got tired. 

On the eastern end of Cock Lane, at its intersection with Giltspur Street,  the Fortune of War pub once stood. It later became a notorious hangout for body snatchers or resurrection men who supplied fresh corpses to London's anatomists, but that's another story. 

After the fire was snuffed out, some civic-minded folk put up a warning on the wall of the pub. They attached a golden cupid-like statue called the Golden Boy of Pye Corner. 

The inscription below the statue read: "This Boy is in Memmory [sic] Put up for the late FIRE OF LONDON Ocassion'd by the Sin of Gluttony." I doubt many of London's poor agreed with that assessment. 

The pub is no longer there, but the statue and inscription are. You have to look up to see it, because it is placed about fifteen feet above the ground. 

At the other end of Cock Lane, a short distance away, is the locale of another fascinating story, that of the Cock Lane Ghost. The ghost allegedly haunted a house here in the 1760's, a century after the Great Fire. 

Dr. Samuel Johnson of dictionary fame, exposed the ghost as a fake, alas, but it caused quite a stir and a scandal. The story is too long to relate here, but you can learn about it in a book by Paul Chambers, Cock Lane Ghost: Murder, Sex, and Haunting in Dr. Johnson's London.

If you turn left at this end of Cock Lane, you will quickly arrive at Newgate Street, named for the infamous Newgate Prison which stood nearby. You will pass St. Sepulchre Without Newgate, the largest parish church in the City. 

St Sepulchre's bells are the "Bells of Old Bailey," in the famous rhyme "Oranges and Lemons." A special bell was rung on the days when executions took place at the prison, which was pretty often until the late nineteenth century. The execution bell is displayed within the church, which ironically has been the official musicians' church of London for many years.

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History as She is Learned: Some of my Students' Greatest Hits

"Visits to Bedlam Lunatic Hospital by prominent socialites and political figures (such as the Prince of Whales) increased the popularity of these visits throughout the general public."

(Image: George, Prince of Wales, by James Gillray)

"The Haitian Revolutionaries defeated the French due to gorilla warfare."

“Thomas Wolsey was born a pheasant and grew up to be a cardinal.”

"The Flagellants flatulated themselves for religion, believing the plaque was the work of God."

"Voltaire argued that forcing people to believe in a particular religion produced hippocrates."

"The Battle of the Nile provided the impotence for Great Britain to exercise a greater hold on their colonies".

"If not for his role in finding Livingstone, Henry Stanley would not have sat on Parliament."

See if you can find Stanley in this picture.

THE END (is near).