Browse Exhibits (1 total)

The Enlightenment and Eroticism

This salon focuses on the connection between anatomy, sex, religion, and politics in the Enlightenment. Through dissections and work of questionable legality regarding the human body surgeons, anatomists, and others in the burgeoning field of medicine were able to learn an incredible amount of information about how the body worked and what it looked like on the inside. This eventually led some medical (and non-medical) cartoonists and artists to move from illustrating human anatomy to using their knowledge to create pornographic images, often politically and socially charged, for public use and pleasure. There were a number of crossovers between the two subjects that depicted things like the sensual exhibition of internal parts such as organs or straight pornography with the subject(s)’s innards on display for the viewer during the sexual acts portrayed.

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