Alias Arts

Not far from our hotel in the center of Palermo is Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a little Baroque church founded by one of those orders that looks after the unwanted dead. The space is crammed with plaster skulls and skeletons, mostly painted, but the last chapel on the right held what we had come to see: matching pairs of stucco corpses by the sculptor Giacomo Serpotta, who could impart life and motion to all kinds of unlikely entities, such as abstract Virtues and tired old scriptural stories. These are called skeletons in the guidebook, but at least half the flesh still clings to the bones, especially on the chest and diaphragm. They’ve also kept their original grime; in the shadows, the stark white flesh is almost black with it.

The Swedish physician Gustav Zander’s institute in Stockholm, founded in the late nineteenth century and stocked with twenty-seven of his custom-built machines, was the first “gym” in the sense that we know the word today. His mechanical horse was an early version of the Stairmaster, a contraption for cardiovascular fitness designed to imitate a “natural” activity. His stomach-punching apparatus evokes contemporary “ab-crunching” machines. What makes Zander so important, for anyone trying to trace the Cybex family tree, is what happened when his machines, created in a European cultural context, immigrated to the US in the early twentieth century. They are prototypes of the workout equipment now ubiquitous in American life.

The black granite Ka’ba, the cubical structure that stands as the holiest center of Islam, features at its eastern vertex a small black stone about the size of a grapefruit, the al-hajar al-aswad, which may or may not have fallen to earth in the time of Adam and Eve. Supported in a silver frame, this obsidian-like cipher structures space for some billion Muslims, standing as it does at the culminating point known as the qibla—the direction to which devout followers of Mohammed address their five daily obeisances. Tradition has it that the rock was once snowy white, and has darkened over time through exposure to human sin.

A snowy white stone that gives shape to the universe: as it happens, we all carry within our skulls the vestige of such a thing, a kind of existentially reversed qibla (this one perspectival, the other metaphysical) that gives us our sense of being at the center of things, the sense that we are upright at the origin point of a three-dimensional space. The “otolithic organs,” as they are known, are a pair of sensors—the utricle and the saccule—nestled in the labyrinthine architecture of the inner ear.

Anatomy has been a controversial practice ever since Andreas Vesalius and his colleagues founded the modern anatomical tradition in the mid-sixteenth century. There was a great stigma attached to anatomical dissection and, even worse, the display of human remains. The public regarded such activities as a deliberate desecration of the dead, and this response disputed the central premise of anatomical science. Anatomists claimed to “shine a light on the interior of the body,” and dissection became the key method through which physicians and surgeons produced scientific knowledge of the body, as well as the privileged ritual that inducted students into the medical profession. Anatomy was praised as one of the exemplary sciences of the Enlightenment.

In 1904, the Heidelberg chemist Wilhelm Weichardt made a sensational announcement. He promised a utopia in which men would never grow weary, but would be transformed into industrious and tireless machines. Weichardt thought that fatigue was caused by the accumulation of toxins in the blood, and he harvested a concentrated version of this poison from rats that he drove to death by strenuous exercise. As the toxins built up, he observed, the rats descended into a kind of “narcosis” or “stupor,” before slowing to a “complete standstill.” In his laboratory, Weichardt worked on an antibody. He called the resulting miracle drug—his vaccine against fatigue—antikenotoxin.