Dissected Love
Against a sepia-brown background, a scene freezes between tenderness and horror. A man, dressed in 18th-century fashion, is caught in an ambiguous embrace by a withered corpse, whose musculature exhibits each fiber, each tendon, with anatomical precision. The contrast is striking: the living, dressed with elegance, embodies intact flesh and a curious mind; the dead, nude, colossal and corroded, represents matter returned to science. Between them, a suspended kiss, half caress, half devouring, makes the boundaries of desire and decomposition tremble.
Around them, a still life with persistent symbols: a wilted flower, a skull, an extinguished pipe, a Death’s-head Hawkmoth resting on an open book, creating the illusion of a real insect caught in the scene. This trompe-l'œil, a legacy of baroque traditions, draws on the practice of engraving, where anatomy and organic detail were blended with almost scientific precision, highlighting the interdependence between life and death.¹
Vanitates morbi
This engraving would be, according to specialists at the Dresden Cabinet of Prints, the work of the mysterious Johann Kaspar Todt, an artist-engraver trained in the medical circles of Saxony. It is known that he frequently attended dissections at the Dresden Academy of Surgery to perfect his anatomical skills. No signature attests to it, but the accuracy of the putrefied body, the rigor of the muscular drawing, and the refinement of the chiaroscuro recall his study plates meant for scientific instruction. Around 1715, Todt is said to have undertaken a series of “Vanitates morbi” — images where love, science, and death literally embraced.²
The Baroque Macabre
The work fits within the grand tradition of 17th-century vanitas, where death appeared among the objects of daily life to remind of the fragility of the world. However, here, the spiritual meditation of skulls and hourglasses gives way to sensual violence: the dissected body becomes a spectacle, horror a theater of truth. Following in the footsteps of anatomical painters and engravers — Rembrandt, Ruysch, or Bidloo — the boundary between art and science dissolves: the surgeon’s scalpel and the artist’s burin obey the same desire for revelation, knowledge, and mastery of the flesh.³
The Sepulchral Kiss of Johann Kaspar Todt
It is whispered, in the dark corners of the winding streets of Tübingen, an old legend that still causes the shadows to tremble, as if they feared someone might hear its echoes. Johann Kaspar Todt, a engraver of rare virtuosity, known for the sharpness of his anatomical drawings, lived in the shadow of the illustrious University of this German city. Renowned for its academic revival and its atmosphere steeped in science, Tübingen attracted those who sought to unravel the mysteries of the human body. After witnessing the dissection of the corpse of his beloved — a carpenter who had died of malignant fever, whose beauty persisted despite the corruption — Todt himself was struck by fever. In the torment of his illness, he fell into haunted dreams, where the specter of his beloved, emaciated and macabre, returned to him. In this hallucinatory vision, he engraved the impossible final kiss, capturing the essence of his passion defying death. But this breath, he knew, would not return until his final day.⁴
(To discover the full tale in the vein of fantastic romanticism à la E. T. A. Hoffmann, see further on in this publication.)
Epilogue of a Fevered Dream
As in the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), the German writer and composer known for his fantastical stories and musical works such as The Nutcracker and The Sandman, reason falters under the weight of romantic delirium. The artist, observing death, gradually becomes one with it: he falls prey to his own fantasy, and the kiss of the corpse marks the reversibility of the living and the inanimate. Beneath baroque ornamentation, it is a meditation on eros and nothingness: the desire to know, to possess, to resurrect. In the flickering candlelight, the science of the body becomes an incantation — and the embrace of deathbecomes, paradoxically, the most carnal of passions.⁵
The Sepulchral Kiss
Attributed to Johann Kaspar Todt (active in Dresden circa 1710–1728)
Curiosity Piqued?
For an in-depth study of trompe-l'œil and its role in baroque vanitas, see Vanitas: A Study in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life by Susan Merriam (2008), which explores the use of visual trickery to illustrate the transience of life.
Research on Johann Kaspar Todt and his works, including his Vanitates morbi series, is limited. However, analyses of themes of death and science in baroque art can be found in The Moment of Death in Early Modern Europe, c. 1450–1800 edited by S. J. M. M. Alberti et al. (2016), which examines the representation of death and science in early modern European art.
The influence of anatomical artists such as Rembrandt, Ruysch, and Bidloo on baroque art is well documented. For a detailed analysis, see The Anatomy of the Artist: Art, Medicine, and the Body in the Eighteenth Century by David J. Lederer (2009), which explores the merging of art and science in anatomical representations.
The legend of Johann Kaspar Todt (Todt meaning "death" in German) and his lover who died of typhoid fever, although fictional, fits within the tradition of macabre tales of the time. For a study of such narratives and their impact on art, consult The Dance of Death by Holbein (1538), a series of engravings illustrating the danse macabre and depictions of death in European art.
The duality between desire (eros) and death (thanatos) is a central theme in baroque art. For an exploration of this topic, see Eros and Thanatos in Baroque Art by M. Bertin (2011), which analyzes how these two opposing forces are represented in the works of the period.
The Sepulchral Kiss of Johann Kaspar Todt
An Original Tale in the Manner of E.T.A. Hoffmann.
It is whispered, in the dark corners of the winding streets of Tübingen, an old legend that still makes the shadows tremble, as though they fear that someone might hear its echoes. Johann Kaspar Todt, an engraver of rare virtuosity, renowned for the sharpness of his anatomical drawings, lived in the shadow of the illustrious University of this German town. Renowned for its academic revival and its atmosphere steeped in science, Tübingen attracted those who sought to unravel the mysteries of the human body. Our artist often came to observe the dissections performed by the doctors of the venerable institution. These practices had become common, particularly under the influence of the ancient texts of Galen and Aristotle, recently rediscovered and translated, which stimulated the rise of medicine founded on direct observation.
One day, as Todt took his place in the university amphitheater to observe the dissection of a new corpse, a particular atmosphere suddenly enveloped the room. The air seemed to charge with an indefinable tension. The students, on the order of the surgeon who served as their professor, began, in solemn silence, to lift the bloodstained sheet that concealed the body. As the piece of cloth rose, an odd shiver ran through Todt, and an inexplicable vertigo seized him. The corpse that revealed itself beneath their expert hands was no stranger: it was that of his beloved. The carpenter, with onyx eyes and lips marked by a melancholic smile, lay there, inert, the victim of the malignant fever that had taken him. Although death had marked his body with its ominous signs, an eerie beauty lingered, as if a trace of innocence was left by the soul that had once inhabited him.
This vision violently shook the engraver’s soul. He found himself before a corpse he had passionately loved, confronted with the fallen beauty and the mortal decay, in a scene of unreal intensity. In the heavy silence of the room, his mind faltered under the weight of vertigo, desire, and anguish. He recalled the nights spent caressing that skin, seeking the objects of his desires in the darkness. But all of that was now but a distant memory, an illusion consumed, covered by the icy cold of death.
It was the eve of Allerheiligen — All Saints' Day. Returning home, illness fell upon him like a relentless and implacable veil. The fever, like an infernal flame, consumed his strength, troubling his mind, distorting his thoughts. He sank into haunted dreams where the silhouette of his beloved appeared, not in the gentle warmth of the embrace they had once shared, but in a frightening setting. The specter of his emaciated body, a beauty from beyond the grave, stood by his side, both fascinating and terrifying. His dead arms reached toward Todt, his lips sought to offer him one last kiss. At the sick engraver's first attempts to recapture this lost closeness, it slipped away, as fleeting as mist.
At last, their mouths met firmly. The acrid taste of the carpenter’s saliva first caused Todt to recoil, but as the kisses grew more passionate and profound, he began to appreciate the fetid strangeness of it. Through the emaciation of the chest, he saw the organs tremble, the heart beat, fluids circulate through the revealed network of a body he had once known only through its fragile skin. Soon, their embraces reached a frenzied conflagration.
Irresistibly drawn to the magnificent member that had once afforded him such pleasure, he knelt to take it within his lips. A taste of clotted blood filled his mouth, yet as with the spittle, he grew quickly accustomed and began to massage the limb, resurrected with a vigour greater even than that of its departed master, with increasing frenzy. There came the paroxysm of excitement, and the explosion of the virile fluid—of which a generous quantity yet remained—which was propelled forcefully to the very back of Todt’s throat. A thought crossed his mind: “O, the irony of the name! You are called Todt, and it is Death that you love.” (For Todt means ‘death’ in German.) (Tr. note)
In the stupor of his fever, Johann Kaspar Todt began to engrave the haunting vision that tormented him. With trembling hands, his eyes drowned in the fog of delirium, he traced each detail onto the copper with disturbing precision.He sought to fix this impossible final love ritual. In his visions, the corpse rose before him, emaciated, yet still bearing a strange beauty. Todt, gripped by an irrepressible anxiety, felt his body tremble — was it from dread or pleasure? He could not tell. There, in that moment suspended between this world and the beyond, the ultimate embrace became a challenge to reason and morality, a whirlwind of desire that yearned only to be experienced carnally.
When the fever dissipated and Todt’s mind cleared, he found himself before the engraving, the fruit of his delirium. In this regained light, he understood that these embraces suspended between life and death, could belong only to the afterlife. Through this work, he had grasped a terrifying truth: passion defies death, and even in the cold of the tomb, the soul still seeks the warmth of one last breath. But that breath, he knew, would not return until his final day.
QFA