In his practice, Hirst draws on longstanding traditions in art, namely the memento mori and the vanitas genres – with works like For the Love of God (2007), where he covered a human skull with diamonds, and Mother and Child (Divided) (1993) and In and Out of Love (1991), where he exhibits real animals, both dead and alive. His work has been described as shocking and confrontational, directing our attention to an inescapable fact of our lives—death and our relationship to it.

Anatomy of an Angel is almost identical to L’hirondelle blessée (1920) by Alfred Boucher (1850–1934), a classic and elegant female sculpture with wings. Hirst’s angel has been enlarged, and several layers of the skin has been removed to expose the intestines, eyeball, skull, ligaments, and muscles. The sculpture is made of Carrara marble, a material favoured by Michelangelo, as it allows an extreme level of delicate detail. It builds on Hirst’s other works Hymn (1999-2005), Myth (2010) og The Virgin Mother (2005-2006), where he also exposes the body’s anatomy, showcasing the artist’s fascination with the meeting between medicine and religious iconography. During the renaissance art students used to study cadavers and artists like Da Vinci and Michelangelo produced detailed drawings exposing the body’s anatomy. In this way, art and medical science have developed hand in hand throughout time, despite the church objecting to dissection as a desecration of the human body. For Hirst, science is the new religion. Hirst’s angel is dissected and exposes an anatomy that shows her as human after all.