London’s most gruesome museum is back

Plus: London Gallery Weekend highlights

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Peter Watts on the weird, surgical world of the Hunterian Museum

'Come and look at this human stomach!' says one excited visitor. It's a statement that would seem creepy in most contexts but makes a certain sort of gruesome sense in front of the gleaming cases of the Hunterian Museum, where a human stomach is one of the more appetising items on display. Newly reopened after a six-year restoration, at the Royal College of Surgeons, the Hunterian Museum contains several thousand specimens, both human and otherwise, preserved in endless rows of glass jars. As well as stomachs, there are teeth, bones, eyeballs, prosthetic noses, syphilitic skulls, shrivelled limbs, kidneys, gallstones, bits of intestine, cancerous testicles, brains, livers, and two entire shelves of human foetuses in ascending order from 11 weeks to birth. Some of these items are truly staggering, such as the human penis, dyed red so it glows like an apoplectic saveloy.

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What to see at London Gallery Weekend

Now in its third year, London Gallery Weekend (2–4 June) has rapidly grown to become the largest gallery-led event of its kind in the world, with more than 150 exhibitors from across the capital staging exhibitions and performances. Apollo's editors pick out the ones they're most looking forward to.

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Grant Lewis on Handel's heavy art-buying habit

'False picture, you have deceived me!' Images regularly enchant, beguile and mislead in the works of George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), and Ottone, his operatic hit of 1723, was no exception. When we first meet our heroine Teofane, she appears clutching a portrait of her future husband, distraught that the man claiming to be him looks totally different. Turning to the likeness that won her heart, she sinks into a lament that supposedly pleased its maker so much that he threatened to throw his prima donna out of a window for suggesting he write something else. That a painting should fire the composer's imagination would not have surprised contempories. According to Dr Johnson's friend John Hawkins, the composer 'was a lover of pictures, and for many years before his death frequented, for the purpose of viewing them, all the collections exposed to sale'.

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Thomas Marks rewatches a repulsive all-you-can-eat feast

Few films have provoked such revulsion as La Grande Bouffe (1973). In the wake of its premiere at the Festival de Cannes, which took place 50 years ago this month, audience members who had stayed the course booed and heckled the film's director, Marco Ferreri, as he took to the stage with the cast. One critic walloped Ferreri on the nose, or so New York Magazine reported, resulting in 'the two of them rolling on the floor in near-mortal combat'. Ingrid Bergman, president of the festival jury that year, is said to have been physically sick after the screening.

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Christina Makris goes in search of Carlo Scarpa's Venice

'A man of Byzantium who came to Venice by way of Greece,' reads the epitaph on Carlo Scarpa's tomb, inscribed at the architect's own request. Scarpa was born in Venice and lived there for most of his life but drew influence from a wide range of sources including the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Like Lloyd Wright, Scarpa never formally completed his architectural studies, but this did not prevent him from teaching in the architecture faculty at the Università Iuav di Venezia nor from winning numerous architectural commissions throughout the city, some of which were completed posthumously by his followers.

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In the current issue…

Diane Smyth takes a candid look at photography collections in the UK

On 25 May the second and final phase of the V&A's Photography Centre opens, adding four new galleries to the existing three and creating the largest space in the UK for a permanent photography collection. Meanwhile the Side Gallery in Newcastle closed to the public in April, signalling the demise of a small but influential institution, set up in 1977 to document working-class lives. These stories are at opposite ends of the scale, but both invite us to think about the funding of photography in UK institutions: where it comes from, who gets it, how long it lasts, and what all that means for what is seen in the UK, both today and in the future.

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In the next issue…

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London’s most gruesome museum is back

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