Despite all its educational pretensions, "The Universe Within" is overwhelmingly a work of art. The potted tropical foliage, the theatrical lighting design and the piano music are all part of it. But most of all, it's the impishness of whoever's turning these bodies into sculptures.

Plastination preserves all the nuanced bumps and wriggles of body tissue, sustaining its appearance and allowing the bodies to be easily posed. These are not skeletons or mummies but recognizable humans with skin, fingers, lungs, spleens, tongues, privates, eyelids, even eyelashes, and often enough face left to make things unsettling. Just how much face is up to the curators who have carved up and peeled these folks open with the panache of wedding florists.

It's with a certain baroque flair that one plastinated dead body rides a shiny blue bicycle with "Forever" decaled on its frame. And what about the man next to him, the one holding out a sagging jumpsuit of his own skin on a wooden hanger -- that's meant to be ironic, right? I didn't quite know what to make of the guy sawed vertically down the middle, each half stepping forward to shake hands with the other like forthcoming husbands at a barbecue, nor the man charging at me with reddened plates of freed muscle splaying wildly off his body in all directions, the way radishes are carved into roses.

Such mordant morbidity is apparently de rigueur for plastination exhibits. (Some poses are apparently taken straight from von Hagen's "Body Worlds," which also features a fleshless corpse turning freestyle skateboard tricks.) But what's peculiarly unsettling about "The Universe Within" is how little information is put forward.

The diagrams next to the bodies seem largely arbitrary. One bears the heading "Digestive System" and points out things like the clavicle deltoid muscle, biceps brachii, and quadriceps femoris muscle -- none of which, of course, digest. There are no clunky blocks of prose explaining what the highlighted body parts do, and the partially fleshless corpse rearing back to pitch a bright new Rawlings baseball in the center of the room doesn't even get a write-up. He's just a dead man throwing a ball, you see.

I can't say all of this didn't seem suspicious at the time, and I began to feel that leaving "The Universe Within" without a nuanced edification of physiology would somehow dishonor the people, the bodies, who had made it possible. I tried to eavesdrop as the occasional medical student or professional would start explaining respiration or cardiac arrest to the group of friends he or she had doubtless dragged there.

But I also noted that "The Universe Within's" mission statement stops short of offering any exhaustive education, rather aiming to "stimulate interest in and create a new awareness of the wonder that is the human body." That is, these bodies may be intended to spark a curiosity more than satisfy it. And it seemed to me there should be a place for just this type of scientific outreach, where the volume of facts isn't necessarily given a premium over a general sense of wonderment.

I began to think of "The Universe Within" as a kind of secular reliquary -- like Rome's crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione, where room-size mosaics have been fashioned from the bones of thousands of Capuchin monks; or St. Catherine's glass-encased hand in Siena; or the slumped body of St. Boniface in Prague. The believer was meant to feel earnestly, if not quantifiably, inspired in the presence of these relics. Seeing a cadaver hitchhiking or a plastinated lung -- a real lung for chrissakes! -- filled me with a not so dissimilar, almost religious exuberance.

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