Schedel van een geit 1823

Jean Bernard made this drawing of a goat's skull with graphite on paper in the Netherlands. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Dutch Republic, and later the Kingdom of the Netherlands, was undergoing significant political and social upheaval. This drawing, with its close attention to anatomical detail, reflects the broader cultural interest in scientific observation. But in a society structured by emerging scientific institutions, who had the power to look, to study, and to classify? Skulls, both human and animal, were used in comparative anatomy, a science often used to justify racial hierarchies and social inequalities. To understand this drawing fully, we might turn to scientific treatises of the period, museum records, and biographical information about the artist himself. By placing the artwork within its historical context, we can begin to understand its complex relationship to the social and institutional forces of its time.