The Mind Creative
“First of all, I do it to allay the distaste of people who are naturally
inclined to be dismayed by the sight of corpses”, he said, but (and
this was why he didn’t want to be accused of cheap tricks) he also
saw a clear connection between the appearance of his preparations
and their scientific validity, for he claimed the ability to restore a
body to the state it was in before death. That his corpses seemed
to be asleep was not just amazing, it was also significant.
Because his new technique enabled him to work more efficiently
and to make better and more beautiful preparations he decided
to reorganize his museum, and in doing so, he concentrated more
than ever on the presentation. The collection was placed in a
number of cabinets that filled three rooms. As before, the
arrangement was not systematic: Ruysch turned every cabinet,
which he called a thesaurus, a storehouse of knowledge, into an
individual work of art, consisting of different kinds of preparations
in unique combinations. The centrepiece of every cabinet was an
anatomical still life placed on a bed of bladder-, kidney- and
gall-stones, from the midst of which rose ‘trees’ of dried blood
vessels filled with a red wax-like substance. Among these stood
tiny foetal skeletons. They still delivered their grave message to
the visitor, but by now they did it with a sense of humour.
He maintained that he was merely gratifying the desire to observe
the miracles of God Almighty, but in fact his motivation was
twofold: not only did he exalt the human anatomy as a wondrous
product of