Portraits of doctors and scientists use attributes of profession and discovery to construct identities: books for learned physicians and microscopes for laboratory researchers, plants for botanists, molecules for chemists and equations for mathematicians.1 Such accoutrements signal a sitter's claim to fame, but the less familiar items reveal the full story only once the beholder has had the pleasure of working out what they are and why they are relevant. Portraits that include esoteric accessories may thus fashion identities for both scientific experts and their research objects.2 Histories of these works allow us to explore the relations. Here I focus on embryologists and embryos, and specifically a marble bust by the Leipzig sculptor Carl Seffner of the anatomist Wilhelm His. Made in 1900, it stands today in the anatomical institute of his home town, Basel in Switzerland. The downcast eyes and crossed folds of the coat draw us to look at the object in his right hand. This is surely the only embryo ever sculpted in marble, and the medium contributes to a disorienting effect: the life-size His is holding not the fourth-week human specimen, which was just four millimetres across, but a highly magnified model. The work offers an intimate view of the founder of modern human embryology in the first portrait known to include a representation of an embryo. Because it was shown in contrasting settings -- the His home, art exhibitions and within anatomy and embryology -- it also invites us to imagine how various audiences responded to a potentially unfamiliar entity.
...MoreDescription Analysis of a marble bust made in 1900 of anatomist Wilhelm His holding an embryo.
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