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The early modern human body was forged in relation to new forms of display and reproduction. Within cabinets of curiosities, picture galleries, anatomical theatres and atlases presenting journeys to distant lands and to the interior of the body, the human body had to demonstrate its life-like condition of animation and mutability. The duplication of the body, not simply in appearance but in mechanisms of animation and transformation, present an important challenge to established art history methodologies and in this course we will consider how technologies of reproduction can open up new ways of thinking about visual images.

The first part of the course will focus on the reproduction of the body through new forms of painting, particularly the unprecedented European-wide duplication of the pictorial vocabulary of the Italian painter Caravaggio. Recently, the proliferation of ‘Caravaggesque’ images have led to many exhibitions (for example National Gallery’s ‘Beyond Caravaggio’) but the arguments remain limited to ‘influence’ and geographical expansion. We will reconsider this remarkable production of new forms of painting, which departed from religious and mythological traditions and developed pictorial images in relation to materiality (of painting and of the body) and everyday life. The ‘Galleria’ emerged as a new space of display and opened up a changing role for audiences and interpretation.ÌýÌý In the second part of the course we will consider other innovative and controversial forms of bodily duplication: the anatomical model, which in its simulation of human physical matter – with wax and human bone - operated as an automaton, and one that conjoined animation with physical violence; the image of the cannibal, which used the bodily format of ancient sculpture but also incorporated recent ethnographic descriptions of New World people; and the fantastical anthropomorphic bodies that mixed imaginative transformative bodies and natural objects and were displayed in cabinets of curiosities.Ìý These innovative forms of representation, drawing on theories of nature and new technologies, encouraged the rethinking of the body while new forms of display sought to control the instability of the body.