1/7/2024 0 Comments Waxworks figures collectionPreview the current issue and subscribe here.Waxworks were a fixture on Melbourne’s Bourke Street from 1857. The work of these highly skilled artist-anatomists was consigned to Chambers of Horrors.įrom the December 2020 issue of Apollo. By the end of the 19th century, photography began to replace wax models, which were increasingly viewed as kitsch curiosities. Like Morandi’s wax ear, many of these are enlarged models, and show congenital malformations, such as conjoined twins, facial deformities such as Proteus syndrome, and infectious diseases such as leprosy and smallpox as if seen under a microscope. Much of the diaspora had been stored in the Luigi Cattaneo Anatomical Wax Museum, five minutes walk away, which is crammed full of 19th-century waxworks by Giuseppe Astorri and Cesare Bettini that show an intellectual shift from the study of anatomy to pathology. Napoleon dispersed the collection when he moved the University of Bologna’s campus to Palazzo Poggi, and the objects were returned only in 2000 when the anatomy rooms were restored. ![]() The Medici Venus is housed, like a slashed sleeping beauty, in a glass coffin, and is herself a casket: the layers of her insides have been removed, and placed neatly around her, to reveal a fully formed foetus in the womb, of which there is otherwise no external clue. She lies on her bed in a sensual pose, her neck choked in pearls, and can be dissected or demounted piece by piece with sadistic theatricality. Palazzo Poggi has one of several copies of Clemente Susini’s so-called Medici Venus (a title that reflects the fact that La Specola has its origins in that illustrious family’s collection, but also puns on medico, the Italian word for doctor), which was the artistic star of that institution, making it an essential stopping point on any Grand Tour. Wax modellers from Florence were trained in Bologna, but in the 1770s a rival school of anatomical ceroplastics was established at Florence’s Natural History Museum, now La Specola. Photo: Giacinto Cambini/Archivio Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze Self-portrait bust dissecting a brain (1755), Anna Morandi. These include a wheel of eyes, each one staring in a different direction, surrounding the starfish-like form of the musculature that controls them a wax model of her own dexterous hands, one pinching the other and an outsized ear that could be disassembled to show students its inner workings. In Palazzo Poggi the wax portrait busts she created of Manzolini and herself – he dissecting a heart, she a brain – look out on to her almost surrealistic creations. Morandi displayed them to much acclaim to the Royal Society in London and the court of Catherine the Great in St Petersburg. ![]() She was able to manipulate her material to create diaphanous models of insubstantial parts of the body that no one had managed to represent before, including the sensory, urogenital and cardiovascular systems. Manzolini’s wife, Anna Morandi, who learned wax moulding techniques from her husband, soon exceeded them all in her skill. The Marquis de Sade considered them masterpieces, and praised their powerful and ‘fearful truth’: ‘These scenes of plague appealed to my cruel imagination,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘and I mused, how many persons had undergone these awful metamorphoses thanks to my wickedness?’īust of Giovanni Manzolini dissecting a heart (1755), Anna Morandi. They have the compact horror and seasick hues of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and were displayed in the Uffizi before being transferred to La Specola, Florence’s wax museum. Zumbo was employed by Cosimo III, the penultimate Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany, to make a series of miniature theatres that record baroque scenes of plague and syphilis: gruesome cribs that illustrate both the process of putrescence and the consequences of vice. ![]() In the 18th century wax began to be used by artists working in tandem with anatomists for scientific purposes. The art historian Aby Warburg thought that the individualised portrait that emerged in the Renaissance built on this ‘fetishism of the waxwork cult’. Until then, waxworks were largely confined to life-size effigies of saints and anatomical ex-votos, sometimes depicting limbs and organs. The head of an executed criminal, his mouth open and eyes frozen in the final spasm of death, is rendered in wax moulded over a real human skull, the epidermis removed to show the man as machine beneath. At the end of the 17th century, working in Bologna’s hospital morgues, the Sicilian sculptor Gaetano Giulio Zumbo became the first artist to make anatomical teaching models using coloured wax.
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