Saturday, May 3, 2008

18th Century Italian Anatomical Waxworks in 3D, on Flickr!




Grab your red/blue 3D glasses and head over to Flickr to check out a few of master wax-worker Clemente Susini's (1757-1814) anatomical waxes in 3D (!!!), compliments of Stanford Medicine's newly released series of anaglyphs. Robert Chase, MD, along with a team of many others, have produced 3D stereo photos of Susini waxes held at the Museo delle Cere Anatomiche Luigi Cattaneo and made 6 of them available for public perusal on their Flickr page. This is a curious development; it adds to Stanford Medical School's already rich and idiosyncratic Flickr collection, and suggests to me that they might be trying to produce a series of "classic 3D anatomy" products, perhaps to compete with the virtual 3D anatomy software packages dominating the contemporary educational market.

Theses 6 images, taken in 2007, mark the launch of a larger program (that will include, one supposes, many more images to be made available, and at a cost) and will be launched later this year. The purported goal of the project is to"bring these waxworks to a larger audience that includes medical students and art enthusiasts alike."

Now, I happen to have some 3D glasses and was unable to get much effect from them. Maybe the form of their next release will intensify the effect? Or maybe my glasses were defective? So far, however, I, for one, prefer the waxworks in good, old fashioned 2-D!

Check out all 6 images on Flickr Page. Find out more about the project here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great stuff on this blog! But this anaglyphs are not very good - as you say, the 3d effect is lame, because the objects were cut out. There are better anatomic anaglyphs!