I recently read an article by John Squires, published in 2014, over at Halloween Love about how Dawn of the Dead unintentionally featured a real dead person. Some of the movie crew rented what they probably thought was a fake… Read More ›
Art and Ephemera
The macabre ways human skeletal remains are depicted or used in art.
Which Beauchêne invented the “exploded” skull technique?
The Beauchêne skull, or exploded skull, is a type of anatomical preparation for which the bones are separated and mounted in anatomical position, but spaced out, so that it looks like the bones are suspended in mid-air. The Beauchêne skull is… Read More ›
Lord Byron’s skull cup
Lord Byron (January 22, 1788 – April 19, 1824), née George Gordon Byron (I love that his middle name is Gordon), was a leading poet of the Romantic movement and a good friend of fellow writers Mary and Percy Bysshe… Read More ›
An almost complete list of human bone chandeliers
Ossuaries are buildings or containers where human skeletal remains are kept as way to reduce the space needed to store human remains. They are typically used in locales that need to re-use burial plots because space for graveyards is very… Read More ›
The corpse queen of Portugal
According to legend, in the mid-14th century a heart-broken King Peter (Pedro) I of Portugal exhumed the corpse of his lover to have her posthumously crowned queen. The romantic scandals of European royalty could fill a library so it can… Read More ›
The human bone chandelier and other creepy decorations of the Cabaret of Death
Patrons from far and wide came to sip drinks with names like Cholera and Arsenic while sitting at a coffin under a real human bone chandelier in the Cabaret of Death, a peculiar Parisian watering hole that opened in the… Read More ›
Relics of junk science: Bally’s 19th century miniature plaster heads
The Science Museum of London has a set of 60 eerie little plaster heads that look like miniature death masks. Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832), a well-known 19th century phrenologist, commissioned these bizarre relics to help his students study phrenology. As phrenology… Read More ›
The artistic de-compositions of Théodore Géricault
The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) is an impressive oil painting that is 16 feet by 23 feet by French Romantic master Théodore Géricault (1791-1824). The painting, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, portrays the twisted bodies of the dead… Read More ›
19th century pictures of workers building a city of the dead
Félix Nadar (1820–1910), born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, was a French photographer best known for his portraits and aerial photography. Nadar also experimented with artificial light in his photography in the Paris Catacombs between 1861 and 1862. Because of Nadar’s early photographic experiments,… Read More ›
The ‘Rembrandts of anatomical preparation’ who turned skeletons into art
In the 17th and 18th centuries, makers of osteological specimens built fanciful displays with skeletons standing in landscapes made with embalmed human organs, skeletons dangling hearts on a string like a yo-yo, or specimens playing instruments while sitting on a… Read More ›
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