Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700-1900

The anatomical plate sat in an odd place between science and art: made to instruct medical students and academy pupils, yet often theatrical, playful, even beautiful. Michael Sappol returns to drawings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finds desire running through them, in the eroticism of certain illustrations and in the queerness of the men who made, used and collected them. In anatomy's privileged, largely male world, naked bodies could be drawn while same-sex desire was kept out of print.

Through close readings of work by Gautier d'Agoty, William Cheselden, Joseph Maclise and others, he brings medical history, connoisseurship, queer studies and art history into conversation, with full-colour plates ranging from the brilliant to the barely competent. A frank and rewarding study of how the buttoned-up Victorians looked at the body when they thought nobody was watching.