12 x 18 inch.

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This framable print is made from a photograph by Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein. It takes as its subject a 17th century “Macabre Altar” crafted from a mummified child and 3 fetal skeletons, as photographed in the back room of the département de morphologie, Beaux-Arts de Paris. This photo, by Joanna Ebenstein, is from The Secret Museum exhibition, exhibited at Observatory in 2010.

The piece was described in the catalog Figures du Corps thusly:

“The macabre altar presumably comes from an anatomical collection gathered in the second half of the XVIII century by Jean Joseph Sue (1710 - 1792), grandfather of Eugene Sue who had been teaching anatomy in the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture…

The Altar is a devotional item, a traditional memento mori, which invites the viewer to meditate on his own death (those items were mandatory in anatomical cabinets). The profane relic is composed of a baroque cenotaph adorned with bat wings and skulls, where a mummified human fetus lays. A Virgil verse on the Death of Euryale is inscribed on the upper banner (l'Eneide , IX, 435 ). The front banner bears a quote of Francois Malherbe, from "La consolation de Monsieur du Perier sur la mort de sa fille," the story of a child who lived "for one dawn of time". The cenotaph is surrounded by fetal skeletons of different ages, their skulls pointing down to their sternums seem to illustrate the Virgil verse on the banner " Lassave papavera colla dernisere caput" "Poppies, with their weary thorns, point their heads down,” the Poppy head evoking the small cranium.

The skeleton on the left side is holding a feather stylus, the right hand one holds an hourglass and a scythe, two recurrent emblems in the Christian iconography of death but which are originally to emblems of Saturn. His mission was to be the one controlling measurements and weights, and he also castrate his father with a scythe. Saturn, the Greek Kronos who devoured his children , was very quickly considered as The God of Death. He gives a term to what he generated, while at the same time interrupting his own descendants.”

Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based writer, curator, photographer and graphic designer. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series, and was cofounder and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. Her books include Death: A Graveside Companion, The Anatomical Venus and Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy. Her work explores the intersections of art and medicine, death and culture, and the objective and subjective.

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