Moveable Anatomical Prints in Early Modern Europe: Sensorial and Gendered Performances

An image of a naked female figure displaying layer upon thin paper layer of internal anatomy sits gazing at her beholder; she is 500 years old, and she hides inside her body a spectrum of performances. She is a “fugitive sheet”, and this article is about uncovering such performances embedded in Western human history. The earliest known moveable print bodies in the West, the “fugitive sheets” are a group of European printed sheets dating 1538–1754 that feature woodcut male and female figures with superimposed, moveable, paper flap layers of internal anatomy. By using performance studies, the work of Robin Bernstein, Andrea Carlino, and Suzanne Karr Schmidt and my own methodologies and theories to inform a re-examination of the fugitive sheets, this work reconfigures and reconceptualizes the historical reality and function of the fugitive sheets as capacious objects which are best understood through the performances they create and evoke. This article demonstrates the fugitive sheets offer prompts that allow it to be read as a “script” for performance. I trace these performances by employing an interdisciplinary approach which brings early modern bodily and print histories into conversation with performance studies to express hidden narratives and performances that enliven the human experiences of early modern people in Italy and England. By examining the Sabio Figura (Venice, 1539) and the (Anonymous) Woman (London, 1540) for culturally specific invitations, and contextualizing normative historical behaviors between print and user, I identify embedded performances in the fugitive sheets that include selfhood and self-making, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, agentive performativity, gender, social relation, resemblance, and the fashioning of corporeal imaginaries.