Then were the PMA visitors glad, when they saw the gore

Is it just me, or is the Philadelphia Museum of Art the place to see a rather astonishing number of grotesque open wounds?

The detail at left is from Peter Paul Rubens' Prometheus Bound. (Rubens had help: Frans Snyders painted the eagle.) At eight-feet-by-six-feet, Prometheus is the rare monsterpiece that manages to effect a remarkable amount of torsional tension. Philly has installed it in a comparatively small space, so it looms over the viewer with all the menace of an irate Zeus. The scale, the composition: It all makes clear that there's no doubting the hell through Prometheus is enduring.

Funny: It's not the kind of painting to which I typically respond -- especially because I'm not a big Rubens 'fan.' Baroque melodrama usually makes me wince in disbelief. Not here. The Philadelphia painting is terrifically stomach-churning. Eight days later, I'm still fascinated by it.

Downstairs -- and for now you've really got to work to get to it because the museum's doors to the American galleries are shut and the Ce$anne show has made it a little complicated to find and to reach the American galleries -- is Thomas Eakins' famous The Gross Clinic.

It's almost exactly the same size as the Rubens/Snyders. It's not as intense a painting. In the Eakins there are two foci: The wound in the cadaver into which several medicos are thrusting their fingers, and a spotlit Dr. Samuel D. Gross, who has the wisdom to be looking away from the wound even as he apparently encourages his students to key in on it.

In person, at full-scale, it's a much greater painting than JPEGs would indicate. Remember: It was painted in 1875, a decade after medicine didn't exactly cover itself with glory during the Civil War. In some ways it's not just a painted tribute to a learned professor, it's a statement of belief in medicine, a painting partially meant to encourage doubters to believe in advancement of the discipline.

Finally, in the museum's contemporary galleries, you can find a Jeff Wall lightbox that isn't in the PMA's collection, but that is often here on loan: Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986). Consider it Wall's raucously twisted commentary on wounds-(and-war)-in-art.

Dead Troops looks like a fantastically bizarre, post-Boschian trompe l'oeil battle-scene. The closer you get to it, the more the un-real details reveal themselves. As you can see in this example, Dead Troops is full of faux-macabre wounds that the ghostly soldiers are poking, perhaps to see if they're real and perhaps to show 'em off. The soldiers are also exhibiting their own entrails, as if to say, 'How about it! I'm thrusting my hand into my side so that you will believe!!'

In fact, you might say that Wall's soldiers are proving the 'reality' of their wounds to the doubting Thomases among them (and among us).

Related: The Tate has a nice page on the Wall, complete with plenty of image-details from the lightbox, here.

Update/correx: Uh, apparently the body/patient in The Gross Clinic is alive. This had never even occurred to me. I'm kind of wishing it hadn't.