SPAH Seminar Series, Week 25: Black Apollo: Aesthetics, Dissection and Race in Joseph Maclise's Surgical Anatomy

Philosophy and Art History Research Seminar meets weekly during term time to discuss various topics.

Dr Keren Hammerschlag from the Australian National University is running a seminar on 'Black Apollo: Aesthetics, Dissection and Race in Joseph Maclise’s Surgical Anatomy'.

Biography 

Keren Hammerschlag is a lecturer in art history and curatorship in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory in the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University. She is the author of Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection (2015), and several articles on Victorian and Edwardian art and visual culture. Her current research focuses on the intersections between art and medicine during the Victorian period. She recently published an article, ‘Christ’s Racial Origins: Finding the Jewish Race in Victorian History Painting,’ in The Art Bulletin. 

Abstract: Black Apollo: Aesthetics, Dissection and Race in Joseph Maclise’s Surgical Anatomy  

This talk is concerned with the complex relationship between aesthetics and race in nineteenth-century anatomical illustration, with a focus on Joseph Maclise’s 1851 anatomical atlas, Surgical Anatomy. Maclise’s atlas contains several unusual illustrations of the dissection of a Black man, prompting an interrogation of the racial identities of those who ended up on dissecting tables against their will during the nineteenth century. At the same time, the cadavers in Maclise’s atlas are notably aestheticised, placing them in dialogue with classical statues such as the Apollo Belvedere, the ‘high’ art productions of Joseph’s brother, the Royal Academician Daniel Maclise, and abolition imagery from the period.   

Zoom Link

If you would like to join this seminar, please email Hannah Whiting, SPAH School Manager, on hannah.witing@essex.ac.uk to request the zoom link.