An astounding wooden Anatomical Eve from an unnamed private collection, as featured in the "Anatomie des Vanités" exhibit at The Erasmus House in Brussels, Belgium in 2008.

An overview of the exhibition, from the museum flyer:

The exhibition includes animals, Narwhal tusks, an anatomical Eve, a whale's penis, 'vanities', turned ivories, testimony to the masters' virtuosity an of the taste for curiosities that could be found in the 'Wunderkammern' of the 16th and 17th centuries. These historic objects are contrasted with contemporary art (Jan fabre, Marie-Jo Lafontaine) and with paintings of this Museum (Jerome Bosh, Quentin Massys, Hans Holbein). The artist Aida Kazarian has helped redesign the layout of the Museum, on the 75th anniversary of the foundation of Erasmus House. The highlight of the exhibition is a pregnant anatomical Eve, coming from a private collection. This exhibition on vanity, though in jubilant fashion, shows many representations of death, at the confluence of the traditional 'memento mori' of the Middles Ages and the birth of scientific thought in the curiosity cabinets.

More about the exhibition here. More about Erasmus House here.

Inspired by Elettrogenica.

Tonight! Observatory! Hope to see you there!

The Morton Skull Collection: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead
An illustrated lecture and book signing with professor Ann Fabian
Date: Monday, February 21st
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5

When Philadelphia doctor Samuel George Morton died in 1851 he left behind collection of more than a thousand human skulls. Not the grisly leftovers of botched operations, but the fruit of 20 years’ work gathering up human remains from around the world. Friends sent Morton heads from Peru, Cuba, Mexico, and Liberia, from almshouses in Pennsylvania, swamps in Florida, beaches in Hawaii, gallows in Indonesia, tombs in Egypt, and battlefields in Texas. Naturalists like Morton collected plants and animals, but trafficking in human remains was something strange and different. Morton was sure that human skulls held clues to the riddles of race that troubled his generation. Were human beings all one species? After measuring skulls, Morton thought not.

In her new book The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead, professor Ann Fabian details the story of Morton's collection of skulls; in the process, she not only details Morton's problematic and flawed ideas about race and science, but also the stories behind the individual skulls comprising the Morton Skull collection, the remnants of which now reside in the storerooms of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Whose skulls were these? How did they get to Philadelphia? And what has happened to this great collection of heads?

Tonight, join Morbid Anatomy and Professor Ann Fabian for an illustrated lecture based on the contents of Fabian's new book The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead. Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing.

Ann Fabian is a Professor of History and American Studies at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where she recently completed a term as dean of humanities. She has published books on gambling and personal narratives, and written about the bodybuilding publisher Bernarr Macfadden, the ancient remains of Kennewick Man, and the dead bodies left floating in flooded New Orleans. She is working on a new book about ruins. The School for Advanced Research, the American Antiquarian Society, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation supported her research on The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead. She is pleased to talk about this curious business.

You can find out more about this event on the Observatory website by clicking here and can can access the event on Facebook here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

I have always loved the music of Carl Orff's scenic cantata Carmina Burana, but until I saw the above video clip on the Cosmodromium Blog, I had no idea that the music was only a small part of Orff's overall theatrical conception, or the fascinating story of the source material which inspired the piece.

Carl Orff's Carmina Burana was completed in 1936 and premiered to great acclaim in Nazi-era Frankfurt in 1937; it was based on a manuscript of 254 medieval poems and dramatic texts written by students and clergy--many with a decidedly satirical tone towards the Catholic Church--that was uncovered at a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria in 1803.

The poems are mainly songs of morals and mockery, love songs, and drinking and gaming songs with additional songs of mourning, as well as "a satire, and two educational stories about the names of animals..." Within the collection are also descriptions of a raucous medieval paradise in which "the rules of priesthood include sleeping in, eating heavy food and drinking rich wine, and regularly playing dice games."

Carl Orff 's original conception of the staged Carmina Burana (as so provocatively shown above) included elements of dance, masks and costume, set design, and dramatic acting in a kind of theatrical gestalt he termed "Theatrum Mundi," a theatrical conception in which music, movement, and speech were all equal and essential pieces of a whole.

The movement you see above--drawn from a 1975 version Carmina Burana directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle--is entitled "O Fortuna" ("Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi"); it is the best known segment of Carmina Burana and it both begins and ends the piece. Lyrics follow, in English translation from Wikepedia:

O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
always waxing
or waning;
detestable life
now difficult
and then easy
deceive a sharp mind;
poverty
power
it melts them like ice.

Fate—monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
stand malevolent,
vain health
always dissolves,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through trickery,
my bare back
I bring to your villainy.

Fate, in health
and in virtue,
is now against me,
affection
and defeat
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating string;
since Fate
strikes down the strong,
everyone weep with me!

You can find out more about this amazing performance--directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle for Munchner Rundfunkorchester Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks and conducted by Kurt Eichhorn in West Germany--here and can purchase a copy by clicking here. You can watch much of the production--albeit in pixelated form--by clicking here.

Information via Wikipedia, 1 and 2; clip via Cosmodromium.

A Covent Garden resaurant is now serving ice cream made from the breast milk of Victoria Hiley. The dessert has been dubbed Baby Gaga and is churned with Madagascan vanilla pods and lemon zest. According to icecreamist Matt O’Connor, who placed an ad for women to donate their breast milk, “If it’s good enough for our children, it’s good enough for the rest of us.”

This reminds me of the NYC restaurant Klee Brasserie, where chef Daniel Angerer was serving cheese made from his wife’s breast milk.

I think O’Connor has a point, it’s consumed by children, and many of us were breastfed, so why not?

Thanks Kristina Grace for the BBC News link.