Death Portraits of the Dukes of Württemberg
The Landesmuseum in Stuttgart is a history museum about Württemberg, formerly a kingdom and today a part of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. The collection is formed in large part by the 16th-century wunderkammer of the royal family. Paintings, decorative art, sacred art, as well as an impressive collection of clocks and glassware, fill the Altes Schloss, a Renaissance era castle and former royal residence that now houses the museum.

The only part of the building that retains its Renaissance character is the crypt. Several members of the royal family of Württemberg are buried in the inner chamber beneath grand marble monuments. The entryway to the burial chamber is an art gallery of late 17th and early 18th century death portraits. Dukes and Duchesses of the land are painted as if asleep with putti and loved ones in mournful attendance.

Herzogin Magdelena Sybilla Württemberg’s portrait (4th image down) is unique in that she is depicted sitting up rather than in a state of repose. She has been dressed in high mourning and posed in a chair, her head propped up by a left elbow that leans casually on a casket. A grave marker flanked by skeletons stands in the background to the right. The background appears to be a depiction of the burial chamber in the next room, although the room looks a different today with more recent 19th century monuments in place of the 17th century caskets.

It takes about three hours to properly tour the museum and all its collections. The crypt is a little difficult to find, though. Use the lifts in the lobby to reach the first floor Mezzanine level. Then follow the arrows to exit out of the castle, walk along a veranda, and down the stairwell to the crypt. Ask a staff member if you can’t find it, as the crypt is an unmissable feature of the museum.

Director of External Relations. Two key words drive so much of what we do on the Island: "welcoming" and "visible" and the Director will own all strategies and programs to insure that we are both welcoming and visible. This includes but is not limited to media relations, social media and the website. The Director will own work on the Island and in communities to insure that all New Yorkers, and increasingly tourists too, know about the island and feel welcome here. With the opening of the HIlls this summer, there will be a big push to make the Island more visible than ever.

Second, and equally important, we have a new position VP of OpenHouseGi. Governors Island has become New York City's "shared space for art and play" in large part due to this program, where we provide free space to any organization that creates a free public experience. The public enjoys exhibits, festivals and performances created by dozens of organizations each season.  Now we want to raise the program up a level, fostering more collaboration, new ideas, and big ideas, without compromising our commitment to openness and our formula of no curation, no selection and no funding.  The Island is recognized as a national model but we want to continue to learn and improve and grow.

Into the Panopticum: Spectacle and Education in Popular Museums of 19th Century Europe withDr. Peter M. McIsaac, Associate Professor of German and Museum Studies at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Tuesday, April 5
Time: 7 pm
Admission: $8
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn NY
NOTE: *** Admission includes a visit to the Museum--currently displaying rare wax models from Castan's Panopticum in Berlin--after the talk.

Panoptica were popular throughout Europe from the 18th through the early 20th century. Like dime museums such as Barnums American Museum, these largely forgotten spaces fall somewhere between aristocratic cabinets of curiosity and todays ideas of museums. They would display for a popular audience anatomical and pathological waxworks, real human specimens, death masks of celebrities and murderers, ethnographic busts, Anatomical Venuses, waxes showing the effects of syphilis (still a fatal disease at this time) along with assorted curiosities such as elephant tusks, mummies, stuffed alligators, and monkey skeletons. They also presented live acts such as singers, dancers, ventriloquists, hunger artists, and even living freaks and ethnic rarities. Its spectacle hovered between the exotic and scientific pretense.

Tonight, join Dr. Peter M. McIsaac for an illustrated lecture about the rise and fall of the little known phenomenon of the panopticon in cultural context. The Museum--which is currently displaying rare wax models from Castan's Panopticum in Berlin, with explanatory texts written by Dr. Mc Isaac--will also be open after the talk.

Peter M. McIsaac is associate professor of German Studies and Museum Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His publications include Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting and Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealization. He is also currently writing a book-length manuscript on the "secret" German pre-history to Body Worlds, a contemporary exhibition of human corpses that has broken attendance records and generated controversy around the world. In 2005, he received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Teaching Award from Trinity College of Duke University. Before coming to Michigan, McIsaac served as the Director of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York University.

Remembering Willie Seabrook
The extraordinary adventurer and travel writer William Seabrook managed to be a Greenwich Village bohemian in the 1910s, a Jazz Age primitivist who danced on the tables of Harlem and Paris clubs in the 1920s, and a wealthy Westchester celebrity by the late 1930s.

In between, Seabrook tramped through Europe as a bum for a year and was an early American volunteer in the Great War, invalided out as an ambulance driver by chlorine gas poisoning at Verdun. He travelled to exotic locales in Africa, Arabia and the Caribbean, and wrote famous books about each. He lived in Paris and on the French Rivera amongst Modernist exiles, next door to Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley. Man Ray and Gertrude Stein talk about him in their autobiographies. He inspired the French Surrealists, Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille. He knew everyone.

And he has been largely forgotten by everyone since he died in 1945. He’s worth remembering, though, not just for his bizarre life, but for his enduring gift to American popular culture: the zombie.

Seabrook was notorious in his lifetime for his exotic features for the slick magazines, but also for his very public eccentricities. He was, for example, a sado-masochist with a habit for leading his hired ‘secretaries’ around in collar and chains at parties. In his autobiography, No Hiding Place (1942), he psychoanalysed his sexual ‘kinks’, his penchant for ‘putting chains on ladies’, without shame. To play out this fetishism, Seabrook even employed Man Ray to photograph Lee Miller in various masochistic positions. Seabrook’s perversities were examined by his exasperated second wife, the novelist Marjorie Worthington. Her funny memoir was called The Strange World of Willie Seabrook (1966). 

He was a spectacular alcoholic who eventually locked himself away in a mental hospital to break the habit. His book about this experience, Asylum, was a best-seller, and has just been reissued by Dover Press. 

Seabrook was also interested in the occult. In 1942, he published Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today, which detailed his life-long obsession with collecting experiences of occult practice from around the world. This included a brief friendship with the Golden Dawn magus and self-declared Antichrist, Aleister Crowley, during Crowley’s time in Greenwich Village. In 1919, Crowley visited Seabrook for a week of ritual experiment at his farm, in which they decided to communicate solely by various inflections of the magic word ‘Wow’ (events retold in Seabrook’s story, unsurprisingly called ‘Wow’). On hearing of his suicide by overdose in 1945, Crowley wrote poisonously ‘the swine-dog W. B. Seabrook has killed himself at last, after months of agonized slavery to his final wife.’ 

Seabrook’s book on witchcraft was cast in the rhetoric of the sceptical researcher, but intrigued by the extent of belief in the modern Western world. London and its suburbs, he said ‘house more strange cults, secret societies, devil’s altars, professional “Sorcerers” and charlatans than any other metropolitan area on Earth.’ He repeated whispered stories of sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls at dinners in Paris and on the Riviera, and spoke of attending Black Masses in New York and London (‘rather a bore’). 

Seabrook remained fascinated by this sub-culture, which presumably crossed over with his sexual predilections. Weirdly enough, he featured in a photo-story in Life magazine at the start of the Second World War when he hosted a magical ceremony to issue a hex on Adolf Hitler. I suppose it worked. Sort of. 

But Seabrook was cynical about magic in the West exactly in proportion to his conviction that witchcraft still exercised power in ‘primitive’ societies. Indeed, his bohemianism frequently refused the niceties of civilisation and embraced ‘savage’ energies. In New York, he loved the Harlem clubs and was in Paris when a cult built around the black dancer Josephine Baker.  

A longing for release from his white identity explains Seabrook’s escapes into exotic worlds. In 1924, he travelled to the Middle East and wrote Adventures in Arabia, about joining a Bedouin tribe. In 1931, he was commissioned by Paul Morand to travel to the French colonies in West Africa with the explicit aim of joining a ‘cannibal’ cult. It turned out that the French colonial administration was so obsessed with stopping the natives from this enacting this ritual that it was impossible to eat human flesh in Africa.

Seabrook returned to Paris with some recipes and bribed the Paris morgue for a limb from a recent corpse that he then cooked and ate. It’s a lovely inversion: the most primitive act is found not in the ‘savage’ periphery but the ‘civilised’ metropolitan centre

But Seabrook will endure in the corners of cultural memory for his other exotic adventure, to Haiti. In 1929, he published The Magic Island, an account of his journey, to an island then occupied by American forces. He pursued his typical interests: seeking initiation into the native rituals of the vodou religion, and claiming to drink blood sacrifices and feel the authentic power of the vodou gods passing through him. Yet it is in a later chapter that Seabrook encounters another local aspect of witchery.

In the chapter ‘…Dead Men Working in Cane Fields’, Seabrook writes up local stories about zombies. The local Creole word zombi had appeared in some American writings since the 1880s, but Seabrook took the credit for Americanizing this term and popularizing it.

The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life – it is a dead body which is made to walk and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.

The chapter is at first an accumulation of local accounts, but Seabrook is astounded when his informant tells him that there are zombies at work nearby in the plantations of the Haitian-American Sugar Corporation. Seabrook therefore comes face to face with actual zombies, and with exquisite hesitation, remarks: ‘I did see these “walking dead men”, and I did, in a sense, believe in them and pitied them, indeed, from the bottom of my heart.’ 

Finding three ‘dead’ Haitians at work, he experiences a moment of ‘mental panic’, only to decide that these are ‘nothing but poor ordinary demented human beings, idiots, forced to toil in the fields.’ 

The context of slavery provides the framework for the ‘undead’ shuffling slave, declared ‘dead’ by the social contract, and forced to work. In the eighteenth century, the French colony of Saint Domingue, before it became independent Haiti in 1804, had the highest death rates but the largest profits amongst slaves taken from West Africa. 

When Seabrook travelled to Haiti, the American occupiers were in the process of reinstating large-scale plantations and trying to stamp out native superstitions in the name of progress. No wonder the workers were locally called zombis. 

Seabrook’s book was a direct influence on White Zombie, the 1932 film that smuggled the zombie into the major horror cycle that began that year. The focus is on Lugosi’s menacing figure of the witch-doctor rather than the zombies he commands, but it was the beginning of the cinematic career of a category of the undead that has since come to dominate contemporary horror film. The memory of Seabrook is now returning often very sketchily in pre-histories of zombie culture, but his focus on the Haitian zombie is best understood in the matrix of his obsession with witchcraft, the occult and the vital energies of so-called primitive societies around the world.

Tradition holds that the apostle Bartholomew was martyred by being flayed alive.
This brutal torture has been depicted in many different ways over the centuries. He is sometimes depicted holding the knife, which symbolizes his martyrdom. The artworks seem to evolve over time from showing him just before the blade strikes, to when flaying occurs and then in later works after the act, where he is draped in, or holding his own skin.

It can be difficult to view these artworks reflecting the act of being skinned alive without squirming thinking of the pain and blood. This is especially so in the early religious paintings of the saint.

Fine artists took the iconic portrayal of St. Bartholomew to use in their work. One of the most famous being Michelangelo who included Bartholomew holding a sheet of his own skin in his left hand and in his right hand is a knife in his famous Last judgment, in the Sistine chapel, The Vatican, Rome. The face on the skin is reputed to be a self-portrait of the artist.

For the anatomists among us, it’s possible to see past the grotesque barbaric act of flaying to reveal the beauty of the musculature beneath.

Medical illustrators took this concept and depicted a flayed anatomical man in a more anatomical context than religious one in the famous 16th century anatomical publications.

In 1543, Andreas Vesalius published De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body). This groundbreaking anatomical tome consisted of engravings which many believe were created by Titian's pupil Jan Stephen van Calcar.

In 1560, Juan Valverde de Amusco published Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano of which all but 4 of its 42 engravings were taken almost directly from Vesalius’s Fabrica. The original illustrations are thought to be drawn by Gaspar Becerra who was a contemporary of Michelangelo, and the copperplate engravings executed by Nicolas Beatrizet.

This movement from the religious to the more artistic and anatomical depictions of Bartholomew continued with the sculpture by Marco D’Agrate who was a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. It begins to become clear how d’Agrate was interested more in the relationship between art and science than in the one between art and religion.

The American writer Mark Twain certainly did not see this beauty when he saw Marco d’Agrate’s statue of St. Bartholomew in Milan where the saint is shown wearing his skin like a stole. He wrote in 1867:

‘The figure was that of a man without a skin; with every vein, artery, muscle, every fiber and tendon and tissue of the human frame represented in minute detail. It looked natural, because somehow it looked as if it were in pain. A skinned man would be likely to look that way unless his attention was occupied with some other matter.

‘It was a hideous thing, and yet there was a fascination about it somehow. I am very sorry I saw it, because I shall always see it now. I shall dream of it sometimes. I shall dream that it is resting its corded arms on the bed’s head and looking down on me with its dead eyes; I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs. It is hard to forget repulsive things’

In 2002, Gunther Von Hagen’s Bodyworlds came to London, and I saw ‘The Skin Man’ for the first time. Hagen’s plastination process enabled the first and only depiction of Bartholomew in actual human tissues.

Not long after, I saw Hirst’s ‘Exsquisite Pain’ at Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 2009. This silver edition of the piece stands Bartholomew on a table covered in tools with a scalpel in one hand to reflect dissection traditions and in the other hand he is holding scissors (said to be inspired by Tim Burton’s film ‘Edward Scissorhands’ of 1990).

You can currently see an edition in gold at Great St Bartholomew church, London for the next few years.

Oddly, St. Bartholomew is also the patron saint of tanners!

The most incredible example of sadist-surrealist fantasy is to be found among the representations of the various phrases of childbirth and gynaecological operations. A complete model of a patient undergoing a Caesarean section lies with her eyes wide open, her face distorted by pain, her hair impeccable, her calves tied together, dressed in a long, lace nightgown, which is open only at the part of her body which has been cut open by a scalpel, where the baby appears. Four male hands are placed on her body (two operating, two holding her waist): fine wax hands with manicured nails, ghostly hands since they are not supported by arms but adorned only with white cuffs and with the ends of the sleeves of a black jacket, as though the whole ceremony was being held by people in evening dress.
-- Italo Calvino on Dr Spitzner’s life-sized wax model of a caesarean section (above), from his essay ‘The Museum of Wax Monsters’, in Collection of Sand (first published in Italy in 1984, translated into English 2013).

Morbid Academy Presents: The Real Paranormal: A Conversation with Stacy Horn and Mitch Horowitz
Wednesday, March 16th, 7 pm, $10. Tickets and more info here.

The Cult of Fashion, An Illustrated Lecture with Alexis Karl
Thursday, March 17th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Bat Skeleton Articulation Class with Wilder Duncan
Saturday, March 19th, 1 pm to 6 pm, $200. Tickets and more info here.

The Other Paris: The Shadow Side of 19th Century Paris, Lecture and Book Signing with Luc Sante
Monday, March 21st, 7 pm, $5. Tickets and more info here.
RESCHEDULED FROM FEBRUARY 10TH, SOLD OUT

Forensic Pathology 101: Basics of Neuropathology, An Illustrated Lecture with Jay Stahl-Herz, Medical Examiner and Forensic Pathologist
Tuesday, March 22nd, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Invoking the Femme Fatale: Katherine Bauers Fatal, Feline Rites and Rituals: Screening with 16mm film and live music!
Wednesday, March 23rd, 7 pm, $10. Tickets and more info here.

Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses, An Illustrated Lecture with Margaret Schwartz, Fordham University
Thursday, March 24th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Black Gold's Gold Dig: Thousands of LPs, 12 inches, and 45s—all for $1.00 each!
Saturday, March 26th, 10 am to 6 pm, FREE! More info here. 

Common Shade: A Discussion with Anna Sale of WNYC’s Death, Sex, and Money Podcast
Monday, March 28, 6:30 pm, $25/$20 members of Green-Wood or Morbid Anatomy Museum, **offsite at Green-Wood Cemetery's Historic Chapel, 500 25th St, Brooklyn, NY 11232. Tickets and more info here.

Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy Class with Amber Maykut
Sunday, April 3rd, 12 pm to 4 pm, $120. Tickets and more info here.

Into the Panopticum: Spectacle and Education in Popular Museums of 19th Century Europe with Dr. Peter M. McIsaac, Associate Professor of German and Museum Studies at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Tuesday, April 5th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Fringe New Jersey: Lecture and Table by Morbid Anatomy
Saturday, April 9th, 9 am to 6 pm, **offsite at Hilton Garden Inn, 800 Route 130, Hamilton NJ 08690, $45, full day, open seating; $30, half day (morning or afternoon), $25 full day for students with ID, as space permits. Tickets and more info here.

JSTOR Presents: Spectres, Traces, Phantoms, and Sparks: A Poetry Séance by Dorothea Lasky
Thursday, April 28th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Come to Me, or Else! Santa Muerte, the Love Sorceress, An Illustrated Lecture with Andrew Chesnut
Monday, May 30th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Anatomical Venus Book Release Party and Symposium Save the Date
Saturday, June 4, time TBA. More info here.

And I Must Scream: An Examination of Body Horror in Japanese Animation, An Illustrated Lecture with JR Pepper
Tuesday, June 14th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

JSTOR Presents: Dying Onstage: Real and Imaginary Deaths in Live Performance: An illustrated Lecture by Michael Lueger
Wednesday, July 27th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

The Beauty, Truth and Terror of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, An Illustrated Lecture with Chris Alexander
Friday, July 1st, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Common Shade: A Discussion with Anna Sale of WNYC’s Death, Sex, and Money Podcast
Monday, March 28, 6:30 pm, $25/$20 members of Green-Wood or Morbid Anatomy Museum, **offsite at Green-Wood Cemetery's Historic Chapel, 500 25th St, Brooklyn, NY 11232. Tickets and more info here.

The Strange Case of William Seabrook: Traveller, Pervert, Occultist, Drunk, and the Man Who Brought the Zombie to America, An Illustrated Lecture with Robert Luckhurst
Tuesday, March 29th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Stiffs, Skulls & Skeletons: Medical Photography and Symbolism, Illustrated Lecture & Book Signing by Stanley B. Burns, MD & Elizabeth A. Burns
Thursday, March 31st, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Victorian Hair Art Workshop with Master Jeweler Karen Bachmann
Saturday, April 2nd, 11 am to 6 pm (with one hour lunch break), $150. Tickets and more info here.

Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy Class with Amber Maykut
Sunday, April 3rd, 12 pm to 4 pm, $120. Tickets and more info here.

Alchemy and Dream: The Lunar Realm of Alchemy, An Illustrated Lecture with Brian Cotnoir
Monday, April 4th, 7 pm, $10. Tickets and more info here.

Into the Panopticum: Spectacle and Education in Popular Museums of 19th Century Europe with Dr. Peter M. McIsaac, Associate Professor of German and Museum Studies at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Tuesday, April 5th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Morbid Academy Presents: Tales from the Crypt: A Conversation with Ptolemy Tompkins and Mitch Horowitz
Wednesday, April 6th, 7 pm, $10. Tickets and more info here.

Fringe New Jersey: Lecture and Table by Morbid Anatomy
Saturday, April 9th, 9 am to 6 pm, **offsite at Hilton Garden Inn, 800 Route 130, Hamilton NJ 08690, $45, full day, open seating; $30, half day (morning or afternoon), $25 full day for students with ID, as space permits. Tickets and more info here.

The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World: An Illustrated Lecture with David Jaher
Monday, April 11th, 7 pm, $5. Tickets and more info here.

Second Annual Morbid Anatomy Museum Gala with Honorary Chair Parker Posey
Tuesday, April 12th, 7 PM (6:30 for VIP), $250 (Regular Ticket), $500 (VIP Ticket with champagne toast at the Museum); $2500 (Table for 5, includes VIP champagne toast); $5000 (Table for 10, includes VIP champagne toast).
Tickets and more info here.

Gala Afterparty with DJ Set by Erasure's Vince Clarke and Sponsored by Sixpoint Brewery
Tuesday, April 12th, 9 pm till late, $50, 21+. Tickets and more info here.

Atomic Doomsday Battle of the DJs: 78 Records vs. 16mm Film
Wednesday, April 13th, 7 pm, $10. Tickets and more info here.

Demystifying Shamanism: An Illustrated Presentation with Dr. Stanley Krippner
Thursday, April 14th, 7 pm, $15. Tickets and more info here.

Stop Motion Cut-Out/Collage Animation Class with Nicole Antebi
Sunday, April 17th, 12 pm to 6 pm, $50. Tickets and more info here.

Image Within/ Image Without: Iconography, Symbols, and the Psychology Reflected Therein - A Discussion of Historical and Modern Divinatory Practices with Dr. Al Cummins and Jesse Hathaway Diaz
Monday April 18th, 7 pm, $15. Tickets and more info here.

Bringing Back the Cabinet of Curiosities, Including a Brief and Wondrous History of the Wunderkammer: An Illustrated Lecture with Susan Harlan
Tuesday, April 19th, 7pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Behind the Walls: Shadows of the New England Asylums, An Illustrated Lecture by Kate Anderson
Tuesday, April 20th, 7 pm, $5. Tickets and more info here.

Life After Near Death, An Illustrated Lecture with Debra Diamond
Thursday, April 21st, 7 pm, $5. Tickets and more info here.

Gloom, Torment and Nightmare: Francisco Goyas Black Paintings, an Illustrated Lecture with Cristina Perez Arranz
Saturday, April 23rd, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

The History of Leopard Print, An Illustrated Lecture with Jo Weldon
Tuesday, April 26th, 7 pm, $10. Tickets and more info here.

Goth 101: A History of the Postpunk and Goth Subculture, 1978 - 1992, An Illustrated Lecture with Andi Harriman
Wednesday, April 27th, 7 pm, $12. Tickets and more info here.

JSTOR Presents: Spectres, Traces, Phantoms, and Sparks: A Poetry Séance by Dorothea Lasky
Thursday, April 28th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Murnau's Faust (1926) on 16mm Film With Live Music by Bradford Reed and Geoff Gersh
Friday, April 29th, 7 pm, $12. Tickets and more info here.

The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, An Illustrated Lecture with Historian Thomas W. Laqueur, University of California at Berkeley
Monday, May 2nd, 7 pm, $5. Tickets and more info here.

Peacock Taxidermy Demonstration with Taxidermist in Residence Divya Anantharaman
Thursday, May 5th, 7 pm, $20. Tickets and more info here.

Psychedelics and Death: A Brief Introduction with Dr. Neal Goldsmith Ph.D
Friday, May 6th, 8 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Insect, Arachnid, and Reptile Petting Zoo with NYU Biology Student Aaron Rodriguez
Monday, May 16th, 7 pm, $12. Tickets and more info here.

Morbid Academy Presents: Things That Go Bump, a Conversation with Shannon Taggart and Mitch Horowitz
Wednesday, May 18th, 7pm, $10. Tickets and more info here.

Shakespeare's Funeral: Illustrated Lecture and Costume Party to Celebrate Shakespeare's 400th Death Anniversary
Friday, May 20th, 7 pm, $20, Tickets and more info here.

"Witchcraft Through the Ages" (Haxan) - Polka music! Butter Churns! 16mm silent film screening with Victrola!
Tuesday, May 24th, 7 pm, $12. Tickets and more info here.
& Wednesday, May 25th, 7pm, $12. Tickets and more info here.

Celebrate Strange Tales: A Reading and Book Launch Party with Author Daniel Braum
Thursday, May 26th, 7 pm, $5. Tickets and more info here.

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble; Narcissism, Mourning & Sexuality: Freud and Lacan Meet Dalí and Goldin, An Illustrating Lecture with Claire-Madeline Culkin and Ray O Neill
Friday, May 27th, 7 pm, $12. Tickets and more info here.

Come to Me, or Else! Santa Muerte, the Love Sorceress, An Illustrated Lecture with Andrew Chesnut
Monday, May 30th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

The Coney Island Incubator Babies: How a Sideshow Became Standard Practice in Neonatal Intensive Care, an Illustrated Lecture with Elizabeth Yuko
Wednesday, June 1st, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Anatomical Venus Book Release Party and Symposium Save the Date
Saturday, June 4, time TBA. More info here.

And I Must Scream: An Examination of Body Horror in Japanese Animation, An Illustrated Lecture with JR Pepper
Tuesday, June 14th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

The Beauty, Truth and Terror of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, An Illustrated Lecture with Chris Alexander
Friday, July 1st, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

Surrealism and Alchemy: More than just a pretty picture, an Illustrated Lecture with Brian Cotnoir
Friday July 8th, 7 pm, $10. Tickets and more info here.

JSTOR Presents: Dying Onstage: Real and Imaginary Deaths in Live Performance: An illustrated Lecture by Michael Lueger
Wednesday, July 27th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

The Satanic Sex: Puppets, and the Pathological Feminine in Vienna 1900, an Illustrated Lecture with Frankie Roe
Thursday, November 10th, 7 pm, $8. Tickets and more info here.

The Seven Sorrows of Mary are a popular Roman Catholic devotion. In common religious Catholic imagery, the Blessed Virgin Mary is portrayed in a sorrowful and lacrimating affect, with seven daggers piercing her heart, often bleeding. Devotional prayers that consist of meditation began to elaborate on her Seven Sorrows based on the prophecy of Simeon... [Those seven sorrows are]:

The Prophecy of Saint Simeon. (Luke 2:34–35)
The Escape and Flight into Egypt. (Matthew 2:13)
The Loss of the Child Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem. (Luke 2:43–45)
The Meeting of Mary and Jesus on the Via Dolorosa.
The Crucifixion of Jesus on Mount Calvary. (John 19:25)
The Piercing of the Side of Jesus, and His Descent from the Cross. (Matthew 27:57–59)
The Burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. (John 19:40–42)

Morbid Anatomy Vienna Anatomy Weekend at the Narrenturm Pathological Museum and the Josephinum Museum

Dates: Friday, April 22 – Sunday, April 24h
Location: Narrenturm Pathological Museum and the Josephinum Museum, Vienna

Friday April 22:

5PM: Opening party at the Vienna Museum of Natural History. Free admission, cash bar. Must RSVP to Email pas@nhm-wien.ac.at

NARRENTURM PATHOLOGICAL MUSEUM PROGRAM
Registration via Email: pas@nhm-wien.ac.at
10€ per guided tour, 8€ for the lectures
Please specify name and time of desired tour

Saturday April 23

10 - 11:30 : Lectures:
• Introductory remarks by Morbid Anatomy Museum co-founders Joanna Ebenstein and Tracy Hurley Martin
• Eduard Winter on Occult Narrenturm
• Laurens de Rooy on Amsterdam’s Vrolik Museum
• Eleanor Cook: Anatomy and Expressionism

11:30 – 1pm lunch break

1pm first round of guided tours
3pm second round of guided tours
5pm third round of guided tours
7pm end

Sunday April 24

10 - 12 : first round of guided tours
12 – 1pm lunch break
1pm second round of guided tours
3pm third round of guided tours
5pm fourth round of guided tours
7pm end

TOUR OPTIONS

Tour 1: Architectural tour with veterinary, electro-pathology and gynecology focus
Tour 2: copious overview of the collection with emphasis on moulages (painted wax casts)
Tour 3: backstage tour in areas not open to general public, such as the administrative floor, the attic, the depot and the preparation

10€ each, please specify time and name of tour when making reservations.

JOSEPHINUM PROGRAM
Registration required via E-Mail: sammlungen@meduniwien.ac.at

Saturday April 23 & Sunday April 24
Guided tour package // price 17€ (cash only) for three tours
maximum of participants 80

Starting times: 10:00 am and 2:30 pm
• Anatomic wax models (30 minutes)
• Temporary exhibition „de oculis“ (30 minutes)
• Walking tour “Old general hospital Vienna” (45 minutes)

Sunday, 24rd April
Lecture and guided tour package // price 30€ (cash only)
maximum of participants 80
Lectures (20 minutes each)
Starting time: 10:30 am

Christiane Druml, Director of the Josephinum
• History of the Josephinum
• Anatomic wax models & conservation

Guided tours
Starting time: 12:00
• Anatomic wax models (30 minutes)
• Temporary exhibition „de oculis“ (30 minutes)
• Walking tour “Old general hospital Vienna ” (45 minutes)

OTHER SUGGESTIONS OF PLACES TO VISIT IN VIENNA

Dentistry museum
Natural history museum
Crime museum
Aqua terra zoo
Sigmund Freud museum
Mozarthaus Vienna
Leopold museum
Funeral Museum
Catacombs of St Stephens Cathedral
Central Cemetery

People like Von Cosel live so far outside our materialist world that it’s hard for them to even perceive ’normal'. They challenge reality without effort, inhabiting in a world of their own design. Which is why I am driven to create a documentary about this strange, beautiful life.
--Ronni Thomas, Morbid Anatomy Filmmaker in Residence