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Description
Skeletons in the Drawing Room: The Production and Popular Consumption of Flap Anatomies, 1890–1914
A Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture by Jessica M. Dandona (Minneapolis College of Art and Design)
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall
gallery@bgc.bard.edu
$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members
No late seating; admittance is not guaranteed after 6 pm.
This talk explores the history of so-called flap anatomies, printed atlases of human anatomy that offer readers the opportunity to engage in a virtual dissection as they fold back layered paper models of the body. The earliest flap anatomies, developed in Germany in the sixteenth century, employed the technology of the printing press to create paper facsimiles of the human form. By the late nineteenth century, colorful flap anatomies printed using the process of chromolithography decorated the walls of physicians’ offices, the desks of medical students, and the bookshelves of middle-class families in Europe, the United States, and around the world. They offered popular audiences access to detailed and comprehensive knowledge on topics rarely discussed in the drawing room, from digestion to human reproduction. Such works not only affirmed the privileged status of anatomy as a visual and textual language for describing the body but also reinscribed older forms of knowledge, including the “secrets of women,” within the framework of modern medical science. By attending closely to materiality and sensory practices, this talk links the multisensorial aspects of flap anatomies to the medicalization of touch as well as to efforts to subvert the authority of mainstream medicine through embodied forms of learning and exploration.
Bard Graduate Center is grateful for the generous support of the Selz Foundation.
Jessica M. Dandona, PhD, is an art historian and professor in the liberal arts department at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she teaches courses on art and empire, the body in art and visual culture, and modern art. Dr. Dandona has been the recipient of research grants from the Fulbright Association, the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and other institutions. Recent publications include articles in the journals Bulletin of the History of Medicine and Mortality as well as chapters in the edited volumes Art & the Critical Medical Humanities (2025), Rethinking the Public Fetus: Historical Perspectives on the Visual Culture of Pregnancy (2024), and Making Sense of Medicine: Materiality and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (2022). Dr. Dandona’s current book project, The Transparent Woman: Medical Visualities in Fin-de-Siècle Europe and the United States, 1880–1900, examines the visual culture of medicine at the end of the nineteenth century.
Image: William Furneaux (ed.) and Ethel Mayer (rev.), Dr. Minder’s Anatomical Manikin of the Female Human Body: An Illustrated Representation with Full and Descriptive Text (New York: American Thermo-Ware Co., ca. 1905).
Date & Time
Wed, Apr 22, 2026 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Venue Details
Bard Graduate Center
38 West 86th StreetNew York, New York 10024
