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)

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.

April 22, 2026 at 6pm
38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall