Art & Anatomy: A Joint Exhibition by the Musée Fabre and the Musée Atger
Exhibition organized by the Fabre Museum and the University of Montpellier, Atger Museum
Dates:February 28–May 31, 2020. Reopening from August 31 to October 31, 2020
Hours and locations:Musée Atger, Faculty of Medicine (historic building), Monday through Saturday from 1:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. (including holidays; extended hours during the exhibition) and Musée Fabre, Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Poster
Booklet
The University of Montpellier’s School of Medicine is celebrating its 800th anniversary this year. Founded in 1220, it is the oldest medical school in the Western world still in operation.
To mark the occasion, the Atger Museum and the Fabre Museum are organizing a joint exhibition featuring works from their graphic arts collections centered on the human body.
Since the Middle Ages, Montpellier has played a central role in medicine and has enjoyed an international reputation thanks to the quality of its medical education and its world-class research. Renowned physicians, as well as many artists, have contributed to this rich history by viewing the human body as an inexhaustible source of knowledge and artistic inspiration.
The exhibition “Art and Anatomy: A Joint Exhibition of Drawings from the Atger Museum and the Fabre Museum” offers, across two venues, a unique exploration of the scientific and artistic drawings that have contributed to students’ understanding of the human body.
The Musée Fabre presents a collection of ancient treatises on anatomy, as well as academic studies depicting the human body, collected by an enlightened patron of medicine with a humanistic outlook, François Xavier Atger (1758–1833).
The Atger Museum section, meanwhile, is devoted to portraits. It highlights facial expressions as seen through the eyes of artists fromthe 16thto the 20th centuries.
This first innovative collaboration between the two museums offers a chance to discover how these wonderful collections—which are closely tied to Montpellier’s history and its scientific legacy—complement one another.
Showcasing these works to the general public provides a better understanding of our city’s prestigious past and the unique role played by medicine and medical education.
(Presentation by Françoise Olivier, Heritage Promotion Officer at the University of Montpellier)
Photo credits: University of Montpellier / SCDI Montpellier – Photography Department.