by Jon Lackman | 19 October 2007 | Uncategorized
In the September 2007 Renaissance Studies, Lucia Dacome has contributed an article on “Women, wax and anatomy in the ‘century of things’” on the surprisingly fascinating topic of eighteenth-century anatomical waxworks created by women in Europe. (If you have access to Renaissance Studies online, be sure to view the article’s stunning illustrations.)
… As the anatomist and natural philosopher Luigi Galvani put it in a speech pronounced in honour of Anna Morandi, there was nothing ‘gloomy and putrid’ about her anatomical waxworks. Rather, being ‘beautiful and elegant’, the models would give a ‘certain and almost incredible pleasure’ to viewers, so great a pleasure that they would convince many to undertake the study of anatomy. Morandi’s own self-portrait in wax presented the anatomical modeller busy in the act of dissecting a brain while wearing genteel clothes and jewels. As an attempt to portray the anatomist, and anatomy itself, through the codes of polite fashioning, her self-portrait is more reminiscent of the courteous and courting atmosphere of Longhi’s social portraits and domestic interiors than of the ritualized gatherings that took place in the Bolognese anatomical theatre in the cold winter evenings in which anatomical lessons were carried out …
Precisely because of its malleability, its capacity to melt and take on different forms, wax had traditionally been regarded as an appropriate material for crossing borders between the physical and non-physical. However, its employment in the production of anatomical models contributed to the redefinition of the meaning of wax by turning it into a medium particularly suited for representing the natural realm. Insofar as waxworks visually and materially instantiated the order of the anatomical body, they also offered the opportunity to refashion the material features of wax, such as softness and flexibility, and their capacity to evoke and replicate the realm of generation and life. Indeed, thanks to the properties of wax, its malleability, reliable colouring, imperishable character and capacity to attain proper bulk and credible shape, anatomical waxworks were taken to be particularly accurate and truthful; in fact, as Galvani put it, even more truthful than the natural body itself. In that sense, the history of eighteenth-century anatomical waxworks is also a story about the role of the properties of specific material domains in substantiating claims about the nature of the human body.
