Yet it was to be a long time before the torch had been passed. “I think this particular way of looking at the world lingered on longer than we think, and you can see that by looking at old medical atlases,” says Ebenstein. “Up until the early 19th Century, you still see memento mori imagery in books that were ostensibly about bones, or childbirth. To me, that suggests these ideas are still in circulation – whether scientists believed them, or felt they had to include them just because it’s the way people need it explained in order to understand, I don’t know.” At that time, she argues, medical imagery as we now understand it was not just a diagrammatic understanding. “It was also about man’s place in nature, about the nature of life and death, and about God. I feel that this idea we have now about ‘proper’ anatomical imagery, which should be devoid of extraneous detail, it shouldn’t have beautiful hair or a beautiful face – it should be as neutral and diagrammatic as possible – didn’t really come into being until Gray’s Anatomy in 1858. That changed how we start thinking about the correct ways to depict the dead body – it shifted in a big way.” Our own ‘objective’ scientific viewpoint remains as filtered as the beliefs of the 18th-Century Florentines. “I think we’re still within that world. That’s now our style, and it looks invisible to us, but I expect in 100 years’ time people will look at it and think that it says something culturally about who we are now.” This dissectable Venus was created by the workshop of Rudolph Pohl, Dresden, Germany, circa 1930. (Credit: Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlumg Puppentheater/Schaustellerei, Munich)