The dissection of a young, beautiful woman

Human anatomy has been studied for many purposes and one of them is the wish to derive statistical rules for "ideal" bodily proportions. Such rules have been used to characterize different ethnic groups, for example, or to provide figure painters with rules-of-thumb when they depict human beings.

In 1864 the Frankfurt anatomist and anthropologist Johann Christian Gustave Lucae (1814-1885) published a book entitled "Zur Anatomie der schönen weiblichen Form" (On the anatomy of the beautiful female form), with drawings by the artist Hermann Junker the elder (1838-1899).

In this drawing, Lucae contemplates the body of an eighteen year-old woman who had committed suicide. She was chosen for her attractive proportions, in order to determine the ideal measurements of the female body. On the left, the surgeon J.P. Sälzer pulls back a flap of skin from the right thorax of the body. Behind him stand two other men, identified as the artists Johann Heinrich Hasselhorst (1825-1904) and Jacob Becker (1810- 1872). One of them holds a cigar and its smoke is suffused in the light of the lamp.