Flayed: The Écorché Body in Eighteenth-Century Art and Anatomy

Images of flayed human bodies, so-called écorché figures, occur with some frequency in artistic and anatomical handbooks from the sixteenth century onwards. Three-dimensional écorché models (‘anatomies’) sculpted in wood or wax are also occasionally listed in artist’s and collector’s inventories from this period. However, écorchés cast in metal or plaster did not become a staple in the artist’s workshop and the anatomy classroom until the eighteenth century. How did eighteenth-century artisans of the body, both visual artists and anatomists, collaborate in the creation of these écorché models? Why did one model in particular, jointly created by a Scottish anatomist and a Danish artist, become so popular and was reproduced so often that it became the écorché model? This paper seeks to answer these questions and explores how the living and dead bodies involved in creating these objects – those of artists, anatomists, and their involuntary human models – interacted in complex ways and were valued very differently in the production process. The author argues that the introduction of serially produced, small écorché models in metal and plaster rather than wood or wax in the eighteenth century reflects a significant shift in the way three-dimensional models of the human body were created and used in both the production and the transmission of anatomical knowledge.