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Hardcover / 256 pp. | 8 in x 10 in / 85 color illus.
Fine Art Print of Tableau available here

Deluxe Edition Includes:

• Copy of book signed by editor

• Five 8 x 10 framable, limited edition, archival prints of Ruysch specimens from the book (see first images after tote bag)

• Limited edition custom Ruysch tote bag (see images)

A lavishly illustrated guide to the magnum opus of the great seventeenth-century anatomist, master embalmer, artist, and collector of specimens.

Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful specimens, in his home museum and catalogued them in his lavishly illustrated Thesaurus Anatomicus. This book offers the first English translation of Ruysch's guide to his collection, along with all the illustrations from the original volume, photographs of some his most imaginative extant specimens, and more.

Ruysch was at once a brilliant scientist, a preternaturally gifted technician, an esteemed physician, a religious moralizer, and an artist whose prime form of expression was the medium of human remains. His works were sometimes described as “Rembrandts of anatomical preparation”; today they seem so strange that we can hardly believe that they even existed, much less that they were so popular in their time. His combination of the religious and the scientific, the painstakingly accurate and the extravagantly fantastical, offers vivid testimony of an era in which science overlapped seamlessly with religion and art.

Essays accompanying Ruysch's text and images consider such topics as the historical context of Ruysch's work, the paradox of an artist of death whose work engenders the illusion of life, the conservation of Ruysch's specimens, and the shifting ascendancies of romanticism and rationality in the natural sciences. Also included is a translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s literary ode to Ruysch, entitled “Dialogue between Frederick Ruysch and His Mummies,” 1827, with new illustrations by anatomical artist Eleanor Crook.

Table of Contents

1. Ruysch Timeline

2. Introduction, Joanna Ebenstein

3. Artist of Death, Luuc Kooijmans

4. The Pervasive Spirits of Frederik Ruysch: A Sculptor’s Appreciation, Eleanor Crook

5. The Remainders of a Reconstruction: Visualizing Ruysch’s Collection, Bert van de Roemer

6. The Allegorical Compositions of Frederik Ruysch, Willem J. Mulder

7. The Macabre Altar: Sole Survivor of the Sue Collection, Philippe Comar

8. Enchanted Anatomists: From Frederik Ruysch to Louis Bolk, Laurens de Rooy

9. Frederik Ruysch: Philosopher of Divine Decay, Stephen Asma

10. “Dialogue between Frederick Ruysch and His Mummies,” illustrated by Eleanor Crook,from Essays and Dialogues of Giacomo Leopardi, 1827, translated by Charles Edwardes

11. Specimens and Other Ruyschiana

12. Abridged Translation of Ruysch’s Thesaurus Anatomicus, Richard Faulk

Contributors

• Luuc Kooijmans: Dutch historian and author of the only biography of Frederik Ruysch, Death Defied: The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch. Awarded the Dutch Cultural Foundation Humanities Prize for his oeuvre in 2004, and in 2008 his book Gevaarlijke kennis was chosen as Best History Book of the Year.

• Willem J. Mulder: Restored Ruysch specimens for the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera. Former keeper and curator of the Anatomy, Pathology, Obstetrics, and Ophthalmology collections of the Leiden Medical Faculty and the medical collection at Utrecht University Museum.

• Philippe Comar: Fine artist, set designer, exhibition curator, and writer, and professor of morphology at the Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1979 to 2019. Participated in the production of major exhibitions and catalogues dealing with the body and its representation, such as L’Âme au corps, art et science; Figures du corps, une leçon d’anatomie à l’École des beaux-arts. Author of numerous books, among them Images of the Body.

• Dr Stephen Asma,: Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Columbia College Chicago, Senior Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science, and Culture. Author of ten books, including The Evolution of Imagination; On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears; and Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums.

• Eleanor Crook (Illustrator and Contributor): Anatomical sculptor and wax modeler who trained in sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools, studying the body from an aesthetic and a medical viewpoint in parallel and working from life and as a medical artist in the dissecting room. Artist in residence at King’s College’s Gordon Museum of Pathology and worked on projects with the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam, the Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent, Ghent University museum, the Anatomy Museum of Cagliari in Sardinia, the Florence Nightingale Museum, the Wellcome Collection, and the Museo La Specola in Florence.

• Joanna Ebenstein (Editor and Designer): Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, graphic designer, and independent scholar. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library, and event series. Her books include Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy (with Marie Dauenheimer); Death: A Graveside Companion; The Anatomical Venus; and The Morbid Anatomy Anthology (with Colin Dickey).

• Dr. Laurens de Rooy,: Historian of science, director and curator of Museum Vrolik, the anatomical museum of the University of Amsterdam. Author of Forces of Form (2009) about the Museum Vrolik.

• Richard Faulk (Translator): an author and educator. MA in comparative literature from the University of California, Irvine, for his research on the intersection of science, magic, and political spectacle in the baroque era, work that he subsequently, and improbably, parlayed into two nonfiction books for young adults, Gross America and The Next Big Thing. He has also written on music, popular culture, medical oddities, time travel, and the science of cannabis. Recently he has been researching and lecturing on curse tablets and other forms of popular magic in antiquity, particularly as means of obtaining justice for women, slaves, the urban poor, and other marginalized classes.

• Willem J. Mulder, restorer of Ruysch specimens for the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera and former time keeper and curator of the Anatomy, Pathology, Obstetrics, and Ophthalmology collections of the Leiden Medical Faculty.

• Bert van de Roemer, lecturer in the Cultural Studies department of the University of Amsterdam.