Honore Fragonard

Zen · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:49 pm Post subject: Honore Fragonard

Honore Fragonard's Horseman of the Apocalypse

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Leviticus 17:10 I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.
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Zen · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:51 pm Post subject: Fragonard Museum

look at this first - http://musee.vet-alfort.fr/Site_GB/index2.htm

and then read this:

House Of Real-Life Horrors
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DiggFacebookNewsvinePermalinkBy TARAS GRESCOE
Published: July 7, 1996
THERE are parts of Paris that never make it into the guidebooks, and the Fragonard Museum is in one of them. Its home, the little bedroom community of Maisons-Alfort, at the confluence of the Seine and the Marne just south of the Bois de Vincennes, is only 20 minutes upstream from the Louvre by even the slowest peniche, but a skein of T.G.V. tracks, elevated Metro lines and Peripherique off-ramps has lately transformed this nondescript suburb into a commuter belt no man's land.

Since the 18th century, in fact, Maisons-Alfort has been noted for only two things. The first is its proximity to the grim enclave of Charenton, the insane asylum whose walls are visible across the water. The second is the presence of one of the world's oldest veterinary schools. The sprawling Ecole Veterinaire d'Alfort, with its spike-topped stone walls and slit-windowed turrets, looks as intimidating and inescapable as the most Zolaesque lunatic asylum. On this overcast afternoon, however, the knowledge that it also houses a museum filled with the grotesque life's work of an anatomist -- one declared mad by his contemporaries -- makes it downright terrifying.

Honore Fragonard, the first director of the school, spent his life in the terrain vague between science and art, using bodies rather than clay for raw material, and Paris's least-known museum is filled with some of the most disturbing sculptures ever created. The school still treats animals large and small; however, if the young woman carrying her poodle across a courtyard knew what was hidden away in the museum's collections, she might turn and run.

The few rusty signs that point to the museum's entrance aren't likely to excite much suspicion. The name Fragonard has long been associated with the refined pursuits of the upper echelons of French culture: the paintings of Honore's cousin Jean-Honore Fragonard hang in the Louvre, and there are two Fragonard Museums of Perfume in the city. But Fragonard the anatomist had other interests.

Born in the Provencal town of Grasse, he trained to be a surgeon and was named director of the world's first veterinary school in Lyons. In 1776, at the age of 33, Fragonard came to what was then the newly opened Ecole Royale Veterinaire. (Today the full name is Ecole Nationale Veterinaire d'Alfort.)

The sickly-sweet smell of formaldehyde is the first thing to greet a visitor at the entrance to the three-room museum. The second is a hand-lettered sign on a desk in front of the skeleton of a rhinoceros: "Unfortunately, we have too few visitors. If you enjoy the museum, why not send us your friends -- if not your enemies."

After buying my ticket from a man who immediately returns to the dissection rooms below, I'm alone for the afternoon. Apart from the cracking of the herringbone parquet underfoot, and the occasional sounds of horse's hooves striking gravel in the courtyard below, a sepulchral silence reigns over the rows of tall exhibition cases.

As I roam from cabinet to cabinet in the first of three linked rooms, it's hard to say whether the items in the collection, most of which date from the 19th and early 20th centuries, were chosen because they were instructive, bizarre or simply beautiful. There's a jewel box of iridescent, perfect pearls -- formed in the kidneys of cows. A piglet displayed in cross-section has undergone "diaphanisation" -- its organs have been treated with a chemical that makes them transparent -- so that it resembles some kind of ghostly deep-sea fish. The pale blue fetus of a horse, injected with mercury to highlight the vessels in its outer membranes, floats in a jar, surrounded by a tracery of quicksilver. Ostensibly, all the works are meant to illustrate some principle of anatomy; at some point, however, their anonymous creators must have yielded to a stronger impulse.

The cabinets devoted to teratology, the study of monstrosities, are a journey through Greek and Roman mythology. There is the head of a Cyclops -- a colt with a malformed facial bone that caused it to develop one huge eye. A siren floats in a cracked jar of liquid -- in reality a baby, born in Maisons-Alfort, whose joined legs make it look like a mermaid. There are monsters whose birth would have augured the outbreak of a dozen Athenian Plagues: Siamese twin lambs, locked chest-to-chest in a permanent waltz; chicken skulls the size of basketballs; a 10-legged sheep, floating in a tank of formaldehyde. It makes a show by the British artist Damien Hirst look like a trip to the petting zoo.

As shocking as they are, these mutations do nothing to prepare the visitor for the contents of the museum's third room. Beyond a central chamber packed with the skeletons of ostriches, camels and lions caught in midroar, the work of Fragonard, the oldest part of the collection, appears.

The silhouette of a horse in full gallop, mounted by a stiff-backed rider, attracts the visitor to the display cases of this final room. As one draws closer, however, it becomes clear that something is wrong. This horse has no skin. Although it's caught in midstride, it looks as if it's been flayed alive. Every cord of its flexed muscles is visible; bulging blue veins stretch over its jaws, tendons and ligaments strain to raise the outthrust neck. The upright rider, arms bent as if to grip reins and a whip, is not exactly a skeleton, but neither is it human, rather an accumulation of brown ligaments, red arteries, yellow tendons. The shining orbs of his eyes stare fixedly into the distance, over rows of gritted teeth. It's Durer's "Horsemen of the Apocalypse" by way of Madame Tussaud (she was a contemporary of Fragonard's), except that this is no waxworks -- these are real bodies that have been carefully stripped of their skin and elaborately posed.

There are over a dozen other flayed figures, or ecorches, on display in the room. The bust of a man, skin peeled away from the skull, is mounted on a pedestal. An antelope whose flesh seems to have exploded away from its bones looks at the spectator in dumb shock; a llama, its tongue lolling, rears back in surprise. Of the 3,000 preparations of cadavers and body parts Honore Fragonard created in his lifetime, about 50 were ecorches like the ones in this museum. Dissecting cadavers at the rate of two a week, Fragonard started to develop the techniques that would allow him to preserve and pose his ecorches. Although he never revealed his special recipe, he probably followed a technique used by other anatomists, preserving body parts by soaking them in eau-de-vie or another alcohol, mixed with pepper and herbs. While they were still supple, Fragonard injected the veins, bronchial tubes and arteries with colored wax or tallow mixed with turpentine. They were then stretched on a frame in the desired position and left to dry.

WHILE Fragonard was still perfecting his technique, the head of the school, an ambitious aristocrat, was quietly spreading the word that he had a madman on his staff. In the salons of Paris, rumor had it that the figure on the horse was Fragonard's fiancee -- who had succumbed to grief after her parents forbade their marriage. (A close inspection of the Horseman reveals the rumor was unfounded.) In 1771, at the age of 39, Fragonard was dismissed from the school. If he was insane -- and all indications are that he remained perfectly lucid until his death at the age of 66 -- his brand of folly was particularly in vogue with the European upper classes. Aristocrats kept him employed creating preparations for their private cabinets des curiosites right up to the beginning of the French Revolution. (He died in 1799.)

As the initial horror of Fragonard's creations wears off, questions arise. If this is supposed to be an anatomy lesson, why the elaborate theatricality of the poses? If, on the other hand, this is meant to be art, what kind of sculptor, using what standard of beauty, would devote his life to creating such prodigious monstrosities? Unfortunately, the only possible response to these questions lies in the silence of this neglected museum, in the works themselves. Taciturn in his lifetime, Fragonard spent his days and nights curved over cadavers, and never published a single volume to explain his techniques and motivations. When asked what he was up to in his secluded study, the anatomist's only response was an enigmatic smile and an entreaty, one that is just as valid today: Venez et voyez. Come and see.

TARAS GRESCOE
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE2D91039F934A35754C0A960958260
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Leviticus 17:10 I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.
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Horror_Writer · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 11:09 pm Post subject:

Cool!
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Woe Unto Thee · Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2007 3:32 pm Post subject:

That is absolutely awseome.
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Aum · Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 3:42 am Post subject:

I hate the smell of formaldehyde.

Aum · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 2:43 pm Post subject:

Check this place out:

http://www.architecturalclassics.com/blog/human-bones-chandelier/

C26 · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 7:10 pm Post subject:

scary Art... My favourite.
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Horror_Writer · Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 1:32 am Post subject:

Love the chandelier! I need to get one of those for my castle someday.
_________________
I do not hide in shadow, for I am the shadow; thus to hide, I hide within myself.

Awen Eldorath · Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 3:00 am Post subject:

I've seen some of Honore Fragonard's work before, and I'm always impressed by it. I think it's absolutely amazing what he's able to do with the bodies--positioning, seperating flesh from muscle and muscle from flesh--the cross sections are especially fascinating! I also like the one that looks like he's "running out of his skin" and of course, the Horseman.

The skeletal cathedral is pretty sweet, too! They should start a franchise, with locations world-wide. Being in the Twin Cities Metro region, I'd gladly offer to be the live-in caretaker and tour guide... Icon_devilconfused

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Albertus · Posted: Sun Dec 02, 2007 8:22 pm Post subject:

I find it interesting that the Horseman