An Illustrated Lecture and Book Signing with Dániel Margócsy, professor of early modern history at Hunter College

Date: Tuesday, December 9th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $5 ( Tickets Here )
Location: The Morbid Anatomy Museum; 424A Third Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215

We rarely go to museums to admire the price tag attached to the Rembrandt, to inquire about the cost of the stuffed buffalo, or to ask how much the founder spent on establishing a collection. Yet, from the first museums to 21st-century America, finances have strongly determined how collections look. This talk brings readers back to the world of curiosities in the Dutch Golden Age, when painters, anatomists, wealthy collectors and Russian czars frequently rubbed shoulders on the narrow streets of Amsterdam. It reveals how the Dutch pursued an active trade in such unlikely items as prepared human specimens, monkey skeletons, and pictures of diseased sexual organs. We will tour the macabre cabinets of Frederik Ruysch, the first color prints of the human brain, and the magnificent atlases of eighteenth-century natural history. As Margócsy shows, the fascinating world of these curiosities often revolved around money. Product marketing, patent litigation and ghostwriting pervaded all areas of anatomy and natural history already at the dawn of the modern age.

Dániel Margócsy is assistant professor of early modern European history (PhD Harvard, 2009). His work has focused on anatomical atlases and collections, cabinets of curiosities, monsters, exotic animals in early modern Europe. He has published articles on the development of taxonomy, the visual culture of early modern anatomy and natural history, and the aesthetics of curiosities. He has co-edited States of Secrecy, a special issue of the British Journal for the History of Science. He was the 2012–2013 Birkelund fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the 2014 recipient of the Feliks Gross Endowment Award of CUNY. His first book, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age,” appears in October 2014 with the University of Chicago Press.