These early artists considered the human body . . . a poor vehicle for the expression of energy, compared to the muscle-rippling bull and the streamlined antelope. . . . [I]t was the Greeks, by their idealization of man, who turned the human body into an incarnation of energy, to us the most satisfying of all, for although it can never attain the uninhibited physical flow of the animal, its movements concern us more closely. Through art we can relive them in our own bodies, and achieve thereby that enhanced vitality which all thinkers on art . . . have recognized as one of the chief sources of aesthetic pleasure.

From earliest infancy, our own bodies, those places of sustenance and desire, concern us intimately; nor can we look upon the body of any other person with neutral eyes. For every human body is a variant of our own, a commentary upon it, even—in the case of a corpse—a foretelling of its destiny.

Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Body Worlds, a trio of anatomical exhibitions that have been touring North America for nearly two years, has aroused so much fascination. This show, whose focus is some 200 genuine human bodies that have been “plastinated,” is currently finishing its runs in Boston and Vancouver, and will soon be on view simultaneously in Chicago, Phoenix, and Dallas.

Body Worlds is the creation of Günther von Hagens, a refugee from the former East Germany and a trained physician who in the 1970’s patented a technique for preparing bodies for study by medical students. Discovering how to remove all residual fat and moisture from cadavers, von Hagens replaced these components with plastic polymers. To these he gave shrill neon colors that served to differentiate the various muscle groups, organs, and blood vessels.

Soon von Hagens realized that there was a much larger market for his product than medical schools. In 1995, he organized a public exhibition of his specimens, arranged in lifelike poses. First presented in Japan, it was a phenomenal success, seen by three million visitors over the next few years. In the West, with its different social and religious mores, von Hagens moved in a more gingerly fashion. But here too he would meet with success. By 2001, he had amassed enough funds to construct a plant in Dalian, China, which is now the principal center of his far-flung plastination enterprise.

Visitors to Body Worlds who are nervous about encountering prepared cadavers are instantly put at ease by the exhibition’s bright and cheerful tone—and by its humor. These are bodies that appear to be having fun: a skinless rollerblader executes a neat handstand; a basketball player dribbles a ball, dodging a blocker, their muscles visible in palpable tension. Even the macabre is treated with a sense of play, as when a doleful cadaver holds up his own flayed skin as if deciding whether to send it to the cleaners.

By these means and others, von Hagens helps us overcome any initial squeamishness. For these are bodies and yet they are not bodies. There is about them not the slightest hint of putrefaction or liquefaction, qualities inextricably bound up with our instinctive dread of corpses. Instead, there is only the dry glossiness of plastic. The figures do not even appear to have passed through the extremis of death, seeming rather to have been arrested in stop-motion, like photographic creations. To remember that they were once alive requires a constant act of will.

And von Hagens certainly knows how to sell his enterprise. Under the disclaimer that the purpose of Body Worlds is “health education,” his website offers backpacks, baseball caps, and mouse pads decorated with skinless bodies. A helpful link even encourages you, when the time comes, to donate your own body to the project. According to the website, nearly 20 million visitors have by now gaped at Body Worlds, whose flayed candy-colored forms tell us as much about our culture as Michelangelo’s David does about his.


The way a body is treated aesthetically is always an index of a society’s understanding of itself. In classical antiquity, the depiction of the human body became, indeed, the central preoccupation of art, and hence of subsequent Western civilization. Although every culture lacking an explicit taboo on figural art has addressed the human form, none has done so with the passionate intensity of the sculptors of ancient Greece. While their predecessors in Egypt and elsewhere showed the body as an inventory of parts, proportioned more or less elegantly, they were first to treat it as a dynamic whole, its various masses and muscles balancing one another in vital equipoise along the supple axis of the spine. Here the totemic rigidity of Egyptian sculpture became a latent repose, suggestive of both action and freedom. This is the quality of idealism that marks classical sculpture, expressed not only in its pursuit of ideal proportions but in its conviction that the beautiful human body expresses an ideal moral good.

The changed understanding of the body that developed in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages required a radically different art. Christianity, too, cared very deeply about the body—its central tenet, after all, is an incarnate God—but it sought to subordinate the life of the body to that of the soul. For the sensual nude of pagan antiquity there could be no place. The artistic challenge now was to make the body corporeal but not carnal.

To achieve this, the function of drapery was turned on its head. In classical sculpture, the role of drapery was to articulate the human form; wispy lines traced and caressed the body’s contours, calling attention to the nakedness beneath. Medieval drapery did no such thing. It masked the body under a turbulent landscape of folds and furrows that followed their own geometric logic without reference to the limbs and torso beneath. Dynamic contrapposto gave way to Gothic ekstase, the S-curve that showed the body to be in a state of rapture.

Further underscoring this same quality, medieval artists abandoned the compact canon of classical proportions and instead expressively elongated the body to make its twisting even more anguished. The peculiar writhing and squirming of medieval statuary functioned as a kind of seismograph, recording the spiritual tremors below the surface. In this way Christianity had added a crucial element to the rhetoric of the body—namely, the trope of beatific suffering, typified in the image of the crucified Christ, the scourged and tormented Man of Sorrows. Although the ancient world had also found pathos in the defeated body—see the poignant images of dying Gauls—these were not ideal nudes. Christian belief in the bodily resurrection now ensured that a corpse—even one in such an ostentatious state of rigor mortis as Hans Holbein’s entombed Christ (1521)—could at the same time represent an ideal.¹


During the Italian Renaissance, the properties of weight, volume, and gravity were restored. For the Renaissance sculptor, as for his classical predecessor, there was no lovelier, more exquisitely proportioned object in all of nature than the human form—a temple indeed. This is the humanism embodied, literally, in Michelangelo’s David, and neatly encapsulated in Hamlet’s soliloquy: “What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel.”

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