Subtle Butchers: A Short History of Human Remains, from Rembrandt to Ruysch

Subtle Butchers: A Short History of Human Remains from Rembrandt to Ruysch, is based on a Manship lecture Dr. Ducos delivered to the LSU community during a campus visit in 2023, entitled Bodies as the End? The Inquiry into the Human Form in Rembrandt’s Time.

For Holland, well into the 1700s, rekindling the flambeau of the Italian Renaissance meant, among other pursuits, experimenting on the human body – artistically and scientifically. As a form and, literally. But where could actual bodies be licitly seen? In the artist’s studio, as live models; on the surgeon’s table; in the collector’s cabinet. In every instance, observation and imagination were at play. Artists, the medical profession, and collectors of the time thus saw the body as a mysterious source of beauty. Hence, anatomical forays, presented with considerable staging acumen, became focal points of the artistic masterpieces from this time and place.

Dr. Blaise Ducos is Senior Curator of 17th- and 18th-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the Louvre Museum in Paris. He is the author of Antoon Van Dyck. Catalogue raisonné des tableaux du musée du Louvre (Musée du Louvre éditions, 2023); co-authored exhibition catalogues include: Fêtes et célébrations flamandes: Brueghel, Rubens, Jordaens (RMN, 2025), Rembrandt, Vermeer and the Dutch Golden Age (Louvre Abu Dhabi, 2019), Vermeer et les maîtres de la peinture de genre (Louvre, 2017), L’Europe de Rubens (Hazan/Louvre Lens, 2013). In 2022, a collection of his poetry, Hypnos parle, appeared. He is currently preparing a collaborative exhibition between the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum, NY, on Rembrandt and the Ancients.

Before earning his Ph.D. in Art History at Amiens in 2008, Dr. Ducos studied philosophy at the University of Paris I (Pantheon-Sorbonne). In 1999, he passed the Institut National du Patrimoine (National Institute of Cultural Heritage) exam to become a curator of French cultural heritage.