Many believe that when we die we abandon our body and reach some other reality. Call it soul or essence, once we pass away, our body –thought to be only a container– has no worth, and thus we’re buried or incinerated. However, there’s a huge taboo regarding our perishable shelf, which can be traced way back in history. From traditions stating that corpses could come back from the dead, to the belief that if they weren’t well buried they would never reach a better place in the afterlife, any activity regarding corpses is highly controversial. Having said that, do you imagine making a living out of human remains?
During the early nineteenth century, Scotland became the focus of all attention due to the macabre crimes committed by the infamous William Burke and William Hare. During this time of industrial revolution and technologic advances that was taking place in England, science was evolving as well. One day, Hare, the owner of a hostel in Edinburgh, found that one of his lodgers had passed away. Not knowing what to do, and trying to avoid a police investigation, he decided to get rid of the corpse. He had heard that a doctor and researcher called Robert Knox used to buy bodies to investigate them. And that’s exactly what Hare did: he took the body to the doctor, who paid him quite well. Soon he understood that this was something that could provided much more money than the one he got from the hostel. He partnered with Burke, one of his lodgers, but they couldn’t wait for someone to die, so you can imagine the solution they came up with. The business was so profitable that soon many body snatchers went to cemeteries to steal fresh bodies. Imagine how serious the situation was that families of the deceased would have to keep watch at the graveyards to make sure the body would decompose and, therefore, no longer be suitable for snatchers.
If the man we’re going to talk about had lived at this time, he would probably find those rotten corpses ideal for his endeavors. As you may know, the business of selling corpses has been around for centuries. Human curiosity knows no boundaries, and the will to know and explore everything has driven curious minds far beyond social and moral standards. However, these activities weren’t only reserved for the field of scientific research. We have cases like Michelangelo, who would dissect bodies to understand their anatomy. Likewise, a couple of centuries after, an artist followed the Renaissance artist’s path, in the early nineteenth century (basically the same time of Burke and Hare’s crimes). This Parisian artist would visit hospitals and morgues to buy or borrow corpses, no matter their condition, to create one of the most macabre yet sublime paintings of all times.
Theodore Géricault wanted to portray a famous scene about a French shipwreck in which about only 15 out of 150 men survived. According to the story, the surviving men used the remaining pieces of the ship to build a raft and picked out the bodies as they wandered through the dangerous seas until they were rescued by the navy. The legend states that many of the corpses were eventually eaten by the survivors, making it an extremely dark and grotesque story. So, how do you remain faithful to the event? For Géricault it was very clear: by getting some corpses. Now, it’s not that he had to recur to Burke and Hare’s practices. At the time some hospitals and morgues would allow students in to study the bodies. Moreover, they had a lending system in which you could take one, use it on your research, and give it back when you were done.
He was very eager to perfectly reproduce human movements and anatomical singularities to endow his painting with veracity and make the spectator experience the horrors endured by these men. Clearly, he wasn’t content with just borrowing some corpses, so he would take home dismembered parts like arms, legs, heads, torsos, and would stash them in different places of his house to study the different phases of decomposition. For 18 months he turned his house into a private morgue and managed to create his impressively macabre painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819). But it wasn’t enough for him.
Unlike many of the Romantic artists of the time, he didn’t use the theme of the morbid and macabre for moralistic or spiritual purposes. He just wanted to portray the human body and its decay as it is. After finishing his famous painting, he became interested in human anatomy and the natural processes it goes through, so he created a whole series of paintings and sketches devoted to each of these human parts. By not adding any context or moral lesson, he managed to show the beauty of our nature.
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Like Géricault, this photographer managed to portray the beauty of the human body even when it’s facing its inevitable decay. Also, don’t miss these images that depict the perfect balance of the macabre and the grotesque.
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Sources:
Hyperallergic
Morbid Anatomy
Edinburgh History
