peashooter85:The Punished Suicide,In 1863 in Padova, Italy an 18 year old girl committed suicide by
peashooter85:The Punished Suicide,In 1863 in Padova, Italy an 18 year old girl committed suicide by drowning herself in a nearby river. Today her name is unknown as is the motive for her ending her own life. However, thanks to a local anatomist named Ludovico Brunetti the young girl’s tragic story would be remembered in the annals of bizarre, creepy, and extremely disturbing history.Brunetti had recently mastered an art of preservation called tannization, a process in which tannic acid is used to preserve skin. Brunetti invented the process to preserve anatomical specimens that were part of his studies. Brunetti requested the corpse of the girl to further his experiments with tannization. First Brunetti made a plaster cast of the girl’s face. Then he removed the skin from the head from the neck up, and tannized the skin. The skin was then placed on the plaster cast with fake eyes set in the eye sockets, basically it was human taxidermy.Brunetti’s work was almost “perfect” except for one big problem, a pair of punctures on the skin caused by large hooks which men had used to fish the body out of the river. To cover up the punctures, Brunetti placed wooden branches around the head, with snakes climbing up the branches and devouring her face, resulting in blood drippings which he made from red wax. At the time, most Christian sects (especially Catholicism which is dominant in Italy) believed that suicide was a sin which was punished with damnation in Hell. Brunetti was basically making an allegory that suicide results in eternal damnation, and that the young girl was certainly burning in Hell.After completing his work, Brunetti first showed what he called “The Punished Suicide” to the girl’s parents. Were the parents horrified, creeped out, saddened, or angered? No, the were greatly impressed by Brunetti’s work and praised him for the life like manner in which he preserved their daughter. Four years later he displayed “The Punished Suicide” at the Universal Exposition in Paris. It won the grand prize for Arts and Professions. Just goes to show that people 150 years ago were batshit crazy. -- source link