The Female Sex and the Gaze of the Other in the “Visio prima” of the Catoptrum microcosmicum by Remmelin: “Between Medusa and the Abyss”

Abstract

In the introduction to their collective volume, The Body in Parts, David Hillman and Carla Mazzio use a psychoanalytic approach to examine the image of a supposed Medusa placed (overlayed) on top of an anatomical engraving of the female sex in the “Visio prima” of Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum. These critics are not only interested in studying what they call the “age of synecdoche” or the “body in bits and pieces”; they also wish to examine the powers projected onto women’s sexual organs, along with the anxieties they produce, in Remmelin’s famous multi-layered flap-anatomy book. However, as we shall see, reading this enigmatic image proves far from simple or unequivocal, not only because it is part of a complex network of signs, but also because of the wide-ranging approaches to and divergent interpretations of this hybrid, mobile work. This article examines various readings of the monstrous figure that serves both to cover and to uncover what lies beneath the paper tab on which it is featured, namely the genitals of the truncated body of the pregnant woman at the bottom of the first page of the anatomical triptych. Through our exploration of the work of various scholars who have studied the image and its accompanying inscriptions, as well as the book’s context, we shall see that the picture in question does not necessarily represent a Gorgon, and that, despite the significant contributions of specialists from different disciplines, this mysterious figure still seems far from revealing all of its secrets.