Article ID: CBB001252148

Changing the Dead to Statues of Stone: The Synthesis of Fossils, Petrifaction,Photography, and the Chemistry of the Gorgonean Arts (2012)

unapi

Taking the story of Efisio Marini as its starting point, this paper argues that embalming and photography are materially and historically connected due to their chemical nature. Photography and modern embalming both originated in the chemical complex of the nineteenth century, i.e., the idea that nature and natural processes could be synthesized in the laboratory. As Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre have remarked, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century chemists experimented with materials, studied the possibilities for improving their production, examined their properties, explored their reactions, and analyzed their composition. Eighteenth-century chemistry, in their words, could be seen as the most authoritative science of materials. Marini's story relates to this ontology of materials in that it refers to experiments with chemical substances and subsequent changes in their materiality and meaning.

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Description On photography and embalming.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001252148/

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Authors & Contributors
Licata, Marta
Rossetti, Chiara
Fusco, Roberta
Sánchez Gómez, Luis Ángel
Gorini, Ilaria
Larentis, Omar
Concepts
Photography
Chemistry
Preservation, tissue
Technology
Embalming
Taxidermy
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
Early modern
21st century
20th century, early
Places
Italy
France
Great Britain
Japan
Germany
Institutions
University of Padua
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