L'Ange Anatomique (1746) | Jacques-Fabien Gautier Dagoty

Anatomical Angel

     L’ange Anatomique, by Jacques-Fabien Gautier Dagoty, 1746

Unfastened avidly from each ivory button               of her spine, the voluntary muscles open virtuosities of red: Cinnabar                                    the mutagen, and carmine from cochineal               born between fog and frost, so many little deaths Buddhists refuse to wear                                    robes soaked in its thousands. Sunsets               of other centuries fade in galleries to ash. Red is fugitive: As the voice, the blow                                    of gravity along a nerve opening to an ache               the body can’t unhouse: As the carnation suffusing cheek and haunch like saucers                                    from the king’s porcelain rinsed in candlelight.               Gratuitous as the curl, the urn-shaped torso, the pensive, brimming gaze of pretty                                    post-coital thought she half-turns over one               excavated shoulder. As if to see herself in a mirror’s savage theater as elegy                                    to the attempt to fill an exhausted form,               to learn again the old ordeals of wound and hand and eye. To find the source of burning.

[Poem by Averill Curdy, published in Poetry (June 2006)]

Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty - Femme vue de dos, disséquée de la nuque au sacrum, dite l’ange anatomique (woman seen from behind,dissected from the nape to the sacrum,known as the anatomical angel) - 1745

Anatomical angel by Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty (1745) + Anatomical Shaw Drawing by Matt Hatton for Alien: Covenant (2017) Check out this beautiful concept art swipe 👉 to see the drawing and detail. “I wanted to play up the degree of ambiguity, contradiction and metaphor. Whether religious/blasphemous or playing on the notion of the “anatomical Venus” (reference of which came from Ridley, Chris Seagers and Victor Zolfo) and so on. David’s sociopathy in full flight and anachronistic feelings about Shaw.” - @matthatt0n This 1746 mezzotint of a fashionably coiffed anatomised woman, L’Ange Anatomique (The Flayed Angel), was created by Arnaud-Éloi’s father Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty. See my analysis of The Anatomical Angel 🔗https://yutani.blog/2018/07/10/shaw-anatomical-angel/ #ageofenlightenment #17thcentury #18thcentury #mezzotint #anatomy #medicine #religion #art #florence #florentine # #anatomical #angel #venus #matthatton #conceptart #flayed #art #AlienCovenant

L’Ange Anatomique, Jacques Fabian Gautier d'Agoty, 1746