In conjunction with the Wellcome Trust, the Mori has put together an impressive and wide-ranging exhibit, featuring 150 medical artifacts from the Wellcome Collection and 30-some works of art, from ancient Japanese to contemporary. The idea behind the exhibit is to reconcile the cold, clinical and foreign nature of the human body–with which we are often confronted when things suddenly go awry–with the body’s warm and inherently beautiful aesthetic that is celebrated both in art and in love. Presenting “an integrated vision of medicine and the arts, science and beauty” sounds a bit grandiose but with the art on view, the Mori may do just that. Special highlights include three anatomical sketches by da Vinci from the Royal Collection, a pencil drawing of the DNA double helix by Francis Crick (1953), the sculpture I Drive My Own Brains II by Jan Fabre (2008), Damien Hirst’s painting Surgical Procedure , and an installation by Gilles Barbier entitled The Nursing Home . I was wondering if Salvador Dali’s metamorphosis of Narcissus, really tells the story of the creation of self-consciousness. And Salvador Dali was being both strangely prophetic with regard to the discovery of the connection between face recognition parts of the brain and the Amygdala.

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