Papers by Monique Kornell
by rodo pfister, Chiara Thumiger, Angelika C. Messner, Claire Bubb, Louise Amalie Schultz Bjerre, Thomas Cousins, Jason Birch, Victor Golubev, Marta Hanson, Christoph Geiger, and Monique Kornell The images and texts in this catalogue testify to a wonderful cooperative effort: Comparative Gut... more The images and texts in this catalogue testify to a wonderful cooperative effort: Comparative Guts, the coming together of over thirty anthropologists, artists and historians to explore the human body and establish a dialogue between representations, perceptions, audiences and communicative styles. The focus is on one particular body part: the innards of the lower torso,what English-speakers sometimes call the “guts”. The images and texts collected here speak about the way human beings have desired and attempted to learn about this region of the body, and to describe and represent it visually. The project’s work resulted in a digital exhibition (www.comparative-guts.net) whose sections, like the chapters of this book, aim to overcome regional boundaries and cultural structures to make as much space as possible for variety and interconnections, juxtaposing mainstream works and well-known stories with cultural expressions that are peculiar, specific, far apart, eccentric and even obscure.
Comparison and the “comparative disciplines”, of course, never allow for straightforward, monolithic projects, and cannot be methodologically innocent in their goal to “make equal”, comparare, different things. Comparison is never safe from applying a measure that is disadvantageous to some participants, flattening incommensurable differences, or oversimplifying complex networks of ideas and influences. These and other pitfalls led Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her 2003 _Death of a Discipline_, to speak of a demise of comparativism as an approach to the human world which divides it into neatly catalogued cultures, generally in translation, within a globalised whole. Instead, she proposed that the field be reshaped into one in which peripheries, local languages, and hybridisation between cultures assume the foreground.
This criticism is not to be ignored, and these pitfalls must be a major concern for a project such as ours. Comparative Guts, with its focus on “image” and “body”, attempted to address some of these issues in various ways: by questioning definitions of knowledge and who should be its repositories; disrupting the very concept of “image” as stably given and immediately and objectively evident to (primarily visual) perception; undermining the slicing of cultures into discrete regions and eras; and questioning the mapping of the animal body into recognisable, universal “parts”. --------------------
THUMIGER Chiara (ed.) 2024: Comparative Guts: Exploring the Inside of the Body through Time and Space. Kiel: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. https://doi.org/10.38071/2024-00345-3
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 2023
The Huguenot refugee artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues is traditionally known for his observatio... more The Huguenot refugee artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues is traditionally known for his observations of North America and as the author of numerous albums of floral drawings. This article reassesses the attribution of several of these albums to Le Moyne based on documentary and stylistic evidence. It identifies the sixteenth-century Huguenot nobleman and diplomat Jacques de Morogues as the owner of one of the albums, and it discusses the production and early use of these albums as luxury gifts in French diplomatic and courtly circles. We document connections between the albums associated with Le Moyne and other sixteenthcentury and later works of floral imagery. We argue that the albums associated with Le Moyne show that developments in floral imagery in this period were driven by a distinct network of artists and collectors, and we offer a hypothesis of how members of this network may have interpreted them as an occasion to take pleasure in nature's charming variety, to praise it as God's work and to use flowers as symbols of feminine beauty and fertility.
Master Drawings, 2019
The English surgeon William Cowper (1666/7-1710) was highly regarded by his contemporaries for hi... more The English surgeon William Cowper (1666/7-1710) was highly regarded by his contemporaries for his abilities as an anatomist and his skills as a draftsman. In this article, Cowper’s drawings connected with the second enlarged edition of his posthumously published 'Myotomia reformata' (London, 1724) are identified and discussed. The article gives new account of Cowper's activity as an etcher and discusses proofs for the book by Michael Vandergucht (1606-1725) and Simon Gribelin (1661-1733).
A reconsideration of the literary sources demonstrates that Giorgio Vasari’s characterization of... more A reconsideration of the literary sources demonstrates that Giorgio Vasari’s characterization of the death in Naples of his friend Jan Steven van Calcar as an early one has been needlessly questioned. A spurious earlier birthdate of 1499 for Calcar was often used by medical historians to cast doubt on the reliability of Vasari who identified the northern artist as Vesalius’s illustrator. A later birthdate of c. 1515 for Calcar is proposed. The problematic descriptions by Vasari in the "Vite" of Calcar’s illustrations for Vesalius are also considered.
The Notomie di Titiano, a set of anatomical prints by the Bolognese printmaker Domenico Maria Bon... more The Notomie di Titiano, a set of anatomical prints by the Bolognese printmaker Domenico Maria Bonaveri (Bonavera) (1653-1731) after the woodcut illustrations in Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica of 1543, is given a new dating of c.1685-90, based on a reference to the Bolognese art academy that met in the palazzo of Francesco Ghisilieri (1650-1712), the dedicatee of the prints. Bologna as the probable place of publication for the series of prints is discussed, as is its relation to Agostino Mitelli’s Freggi dell’architettura (1645). The Notomie di Titiano is placed in context with seventeenth-century anatomy books for artists, and the contemporary attribution of the Vesalian plates to Titian (c.1485-1576) and to Jan van Calcar (c.1510-c.1546) is considered.
This article considers the publication history of Edme Bouchardon’s (1698–1762) anatomy book, L’a... more This article considers the publication history of Edme Bouchardon’s (1698–1762) anatomy book, L’anatomie nécessaire pour l’usage du dessein, first published in Paris in 1741 by Gabriel Huquier (1695–1772). Numerous subsequent issues of the book attest to its popularity as an anatomy book for artists. The article also surveys the compositional sources for Bouchardon’s plates and discusses the écorché model linked to the book and draws on the record of related works to be found in contemporary sale catalogs.
Renaissance Quarterly, Jan 1, 2008
Medical History, Jan 1, 2000
The ingenious machine of nature. Four centuries of art …
The Burlington Magazine, Jan 1, 1989
The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Jan 1, 1989
Exhibition catalogues by Monique Kornell
Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy, 2002
The Vitruvian Path: Early Printed Books from the Library of the Department of the History of Art, exh. cat., Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1 September - 31 December, 1994, co-curated with Richard John., Jan 1, 1994
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Papers by Monique Kornell
Comparison and the “comparative disciplines”, of course, never allow for straightforward, monolithic projects, and cannot be methodologically innocent in their goal to “make equal”, comparare, different things. Comparison is never safe from applying a measure that is disadvantageous to some participants, flattening incommensurable differences, or oversimplifying complex networks of ideas and influences. These and other pitfalls led Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her 2003 _Death of a Discipline_, to speak of a demise of comparativism as an approach to the human world which divides it into neatly catalogued cultures, generally in translation, within a globalised whole. Instead, she proposed that the field be reshaped into one in which peripheries, local languages, and hybridisation between cultures assume the foreground.
This criticism is not to be ignored, and these pitfalls must be a major concern for a project such as ours. Comparative Guts, with its focus on “image” and “body”, attempted to address some of these issues in various ways: by questioning definitions of knowledge and who should be its repositories; disrupting the very concept of “image” as stably given and immediately and objectively evident to (primarily visual) perception; undermining the slicing of cultures into discrete regions and eras; and questioning the mapping of the animal body into recognisable, universal “parts”. --------------------
THUMIGER Chiara (ed.) 2024: Comparative Guts: Exploring the Inside of the Body through Time and Space. Kiel: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. https://doi.org/10.38071/2024-00345-3
Exhibition catalogues by Monique Kornell
Comparison and the “comparative disciplines”, of course, never allow for straightforward, monolithic projects, and cannot be methodologically innocent in their goal to “make equal”, comparare, different things. Comparison is never safe from applying a measure that is disadvantageous to some participants, flattening incommensurable differences, or oversimplifying complex networks of ideas and influences. These and other pitfalls led Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her 2003 _Death of a Discipline_, to speak of a demise of comparativism as an approach to the human world which divides it into neatly catalogued cultures, generally in translation, within a globalised whole. Instead, she proposed that the field be reshaped into one in which peripheries, local languages, and hybridisation between cultures assume the foreground.
This criticism is not to be ignored, and these pitfalls must be a major concern for a project such as ours. Comparative Guts, with its focus on “image” and “body”, attempted to address some of these issues in various ways: by questioning definitions of knowledge and who should be its repositories; disrupting the very concept of “image” as stably given and immediately and objectively evident to (primarily visual) perception; undermining the slicing of cultures into discrete regions and eras; and questioning the mapping of the animal body into recognisable, universal “parts”. --------------------
THUMIGER Chiara (ed.) 2024: Comparative Guts: Exploring the Inside of the Body through Time and Space. Kiel: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. https://doi.org/10.38071/2024-00345-3