From Artistic Horrors to Medical Marvels: The Rise and Fall of Gunther von Hagens

The Birth of Plastination

Gunther von Hagens, a German scientist and showman, revolutionized public perception of art with his innovative plastination technique. Invented in the 1970s, this method preserves human bodies by replacing bodily fluids with polymers to create lifelike specimens that could be dissected or displayed. His Body Worlds exhibitions, which began gaining popularity in the mid-1990s, were a sensation around the world.

Artistic and Educational Divide

Von Hagens' work marked a significant shift from the conceptual art of his contemporaries like Damien Hirst. Where Hirst's pieces, such as pickled sheep and sharks, delved into themes of mortality with an artistic flourish, von Hagens displayed actual human corpses in a way that blurred the line between art and macabre spectacle. This stark realism left audiences not just disturbed but openly repulsed.

Legacy and Impact

The success of Body Worlds cannot be understated; it attracted millions of visitors worldwide, overshadowing other contemporary artists who played with carnality and horror in their work. Von Hagens' exhibitions were seen as a form of educational entertainment, yet his approach lacked the deeper philosophical inquiry that characterizes great art. His work highlighted a shift towards more visceral and less thought-provoking forms of artistic expression.

Despite his scientific pedigree and the controversial nature of his creations, von Hagens remains a figure who challenged public perceptions of what could be considered art. As with many other innovations in the intersection of science and art, his work sparked debates about the boundaries between education and exploitation. For instance, he staged a live, televised autopsy in London in 2002, reviving the kind of gory spectacle William Hogarth satirised in his print The Reward of Cruelty, which depicts the dissection of a hanged criminal.

In all honesty, I found Body Worlds repellent. Von Hagens, however, had an impeccable pedigree for what he did: he was a professor with a long association with Germany's prestigious Heidelberg University. And of course, the frontier of art and science he exploited has a long and gruesome history. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo both carried out their own dissections of human bodies.

Leonardo, however, had true scientific ambition and was years ahead of university doctors in his stunning drawings and notes that dig into every part of the human machine from the brain to the genitals, the foetus to the eye. His infinitely subtle observations make the body's goriest secrets beautiful. A closer model for Von Hagens is Andrea Vesalius, the first 'modern' anatomist whose 1543 book De humani corporis fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body) is illustrated with prints thought to have been made by a pupil of Titian.

Its combination of sculptural poses and flayed horror has a lot in common with Body Worlds: in the frontispiece, an avid (male) audience watches as Vesalius calmly cuts open a (female) corpse. After that, the art of anatomy got increasingly 'real' and disturbing. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Italian art skills produced uncanny replicas of anatomised human bodies in wax, meticulously copying colours and textures, supposedly in the service of science.

The La Specola, the natural history museum of Florence, lets you visit its vast collection of these hyperreal eviscerated bodies to look at and learn from until you feel sick. Gunther von Hagens brought this tradition into our time but also made it seem too natural, as if death could be rationalised away.

At La Specola, the weirdness is explicit—you know this is odd, macabre stuff to be looking at. Body Worlds has a false acceptance that treats death as nothing to get emotional about. This acceptance of mortality also has its artistic precedents, not least in the use of bones to create spectacular ossuaries in many parts of Europe.

In the crypt of the church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome you can see the bones of thousands of Capuchin friars arranged in an artistic manner that might have made Ed Gein blush—there's a grotto of skulls, a chamber of thigh bones. The Marquis de Sade was stunned. You leave with a sense of disgust and confusion, wondering why they did it, and why you went.

At the opposite pole there is Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, in which the body being dissected is seen as an infinite mystery, the pale ghost of us all. Artists, from Leonardo and Rembrandt to the young Hirst, have glimpsed the enigma of life in the relics of death. But Gunther von Hagens was no artist.

Source: The Guardian