The first things we see at the “Body Worlds 2” exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science are bones: plain old leg bones, a couple of skulls, an old-fashioned skeleton hanging in the corner.
Dr. Gunther von Hagens says this is entirely by design. “It iz very important zat people are not confronted with somezing zat makes zem feel insecure.”
Wearing his trademark black hat, von Hagens moves slowly through the exhibit seizing every opportunity to teach me about the layers of muscle in the chest, the damage done to the heart by an infarction, the details of an artificial knee.
“People should realize they are no bag of bones or muscles,” he says. The objective of the exhibit is to help people appreciate that “the body is a thing of beauty.”
The Body Worlds experience is designed to occur on many levels: intellectual, emotional, philosophical. But first, visitors must relinquish preconceived notions. After all, they are about to confront many of the great cultural taboos: nudity, physicality, death. Especially death.
“It is the topic of the exhibition, of course,” von Hagens explains, “so we put it up to a philosophical level.”
A quotation from the Old Testament sets the tone. “What is man that thou shouldst remember him, mortal man that thou shouldst care for him? …”
What is mortal man?
The question is as old as time, von Hagens says. “What is death actually? Do we have to fear death? Do we have to like death? No. We have to come along with our own mortality.”
And so I come along.
We peer at the plastinated slices of a liver destroyed by cirrhosis, an aorta misshapen from arterial sclerosis, the path of a bullet through the head of a suicide victim, the blackened lung of a smoker.
It’s biology, anatomy, physiology, but it’s also art, I say to him, and he hesitates.
“What is art? There is not a recognized definition,” he says. People who dislike certain styles of art “transfer those reasons, those motivations for doing it to me.” Art is just more controversy.
He prefers instead to think of his work as “high craftsmanship in the tradition of the Renaissance.”
We pause at what he calls “the big bang.” In the exhibit it’s dubbed “Exploded Man” and it’s a body dissected into hundreds of pieces, each piece hanging from a filament, each element positioned in relationship to all the rest, like a marionette for a god.
“It was weeks of work,” he says, studying each strand of nerve fiber, every muscle tissue, every bone to make sure it’s exactly where it belongs.
He’s been called a ghoul, a freak, a showman, a sacrilege.
“It’s because he’s passionate,” said Nadine Diwersi, a medical student at the University of Heidelberg and his personal assistant.
He had left his post as professor of anatomy by the time she enrolled in the medical school, but his lectures were legendary. “When he was teaching, the lecture halls were packed and the whole auditorium was very quiet,” Diwersi said. “Other professors still cite his descriptions to help students remember the material.”
It’s “edutainment,” von Hagens says. “It stays more in your mind. Using emotions anchors information in your brain.”
We walk into a room of specimens devoted to fetal development, past embryos the size of fingernails, past the body of a woman with a near-term fetus in her belly – another controversy on display.
Both sides in the abortion debate use the exhibit to argue their points, he says with obvious pride.
We pause before a reproduction of Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson,” and Diwersi takes one of what must be hundreds of photos of von Hagens in his black hat. “I began wearing the hat 20 years ago as a tribute to the anatomists of the Renaissance,” he says, tipping his fedora at the one in the painting.
We’re about to leave the exhibit, and I gasp at the sight of two plastinated bodies, a man and a woman, posed as figure skaters performing an elegant, thrilling death spiral. It’s so beautiful, I say to him.
“I know,” he whispers. “I know.”
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
