Fontana’s supervision. Fontana notoriously gave his artists very little freedom, and the Cagliari waxes are considered among Susini’s finest works. The virtuosity of Susini’s Medici Venus called not only upon the conventions offine art, but also upon a considerable tradition of dissectible female figures. Anatomical illustrations had often taken the form of ‘fugitive sheets’—in which paper flaps could be pulled back or moved to reveal the structures beneath— as well as static, cutaway views in which internal organs were made visible to simulate an imaginary dissection. The Medici Venus also evoked religious prec edents, most notably statues of the Mater gravida or ‘our lady of expectations’—in which a pregnant Mary was shown with the baby Jesus visible inside the womb preVious An interior view at La Specola showing three Anatomical Venuses surrounded by smaller waxes and illustrations of anatomical details. fig. 17 fig. 18 fig. 19 fig. 17 Seventeenth century engraving of the anatomical theatre, University of Padua, built in 1594. fig. 18 A public dissection in Padua’s anatomical theatre. Frontispiece from Johann Vesling’s Syntagma Anatomicum (1647). through a door or cutaway. Also significant is a wooden, demountable, pregnant anatomical Eve from the seventeenth century, whose internal organs and fetus come into view when her breastplate is removed, her genitals discreetly hidden by a wreath of carved leaves. Felice Fontana eventually came to believe that wood was a better medium than wax for creating anatomical teaching models, as it was less fragile and the students could demount and reassemble the model, thus intuitively learning the relationship between the internal structures. He spent the last years of his life working on a prototype anatomical male model of painted wood, dissectible into 3,000 pieces. Due to fluctuations in humidity that changed the size of the pieces, it was never realized. The most common precursors of the Medici Venus were smaller dissectible female figures (or, less often, male figures) crafted of ivory, wood, and other media, known as ‘anatomical manikins’ (see also pages 52–53). The majority of manikins were crafted in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each model is about the size of a hand and reclines on its own little bed, often on a pillow of cloth or ivory. Their organs, though dissectible, lack detail and AV_00966_pre-pdf layout_001_215.indd 36 12/01/2016 12:14 chapter one[1]
(37) accuracy, and are suggestive rather than descriptive. Female figures contain, in addition to their other rough-hewn organs, a tiny fetus, sometimes attached to the body by a red silk thread. These enigmatic and seductive toys may have been tools for teaching expectant mothers or midwives about childbirth. Or they might, as many scholars believe, have been more decorative in nature, intended as collectables for Wunderkammern, or as a way for physicians to adver tise their professional standing. The first full-sized female instructional anatomical wax models began to be created in the early eighteenth century. In 1719, French surgeon and anatomist Guillaume Desnoues (1650–1735) (see also pages 96, 97, 100–101) publicly exhib ited a dissectible wax woman featuring a newborn child with the umbilical cord fig. 19 Engraving of Pieter Pauw, who instigated the building of Leiden’s anatomical theatre, performing an anatomical dissection there (1615). The skeleton holds a banner reading ‘Mors ultima linea rerum’ (‘Death is everything’s final limit’). fig. 20 fig. 21 fig. 22 still attached. Little more than a decade later, in London, Paris-trained anato mist and modeller Abraham Chovet (1704–90) exhibited a female depicted as though in the painful process of being vivisected. The figure was represented as ‘...a woman big with child chained upon a table; supposed to be opened alive. In the face there is a lively display of the agonies of a dying person, the whole body heaving and the hands clinched, the action suitable to the character of the subject.’ (General Evening Post, 1734). The circulation of her blood was dem onstrated by a network of blown-glass tubes coursing with blood-red claret. In France, Marie-Catherine Biheron (1719–86), an artist with experience of the dis section room, had, from the age of sixteen, created wax anatomical models that she exhibited to the public on Wednesdays for three francs per person. Biheron later displayed her pieces in London, where they were reportedly admired by the famous Scottish surgeons John and William Hunter, and eventually pur chased by Empress Catherine II (1729–96). In late-eighteenth-century Vienna, court sculptor Josef Müller-Deym (1752–1804) displayed a dissectible female wax model of a pregnant woman. Müller-Deym also made other kinds of wax ladies: fig. 20 Detail of the female reproductive system, from Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). figs 21, 22 Idealized female nudes, from Bernhardus Siegfried Albinus’s Tables of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body (1749). oVerleaF Hand-coloured woodcut frontispiece of Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Libri Septem (1543). AV_00966_pre-pdf layout_001_215.indd 37 12/01/2016 12:14 THE BIRTH OF THE anaTOmIcal VEnUS[1]
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(42) in 1791, police invaded his cabinet and destroyed a number of models intended for private collectors, ‘the sight of which’, according to Joseph Richter’s satirical novel Die Eipeldauer-Briefe (1785–1797) ‘would in most Christian contemporaries have overturned the good teachings of their preachers’. Human anatomy had first become of great interest to artists, natural phi losophers, and the general public during the Renaissance. It was particularly fig. 23 fig. 23 Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches in pen and ink over chalk (1490–c. 1511). From top left to bottom right: vulva and anus; cardiovascular system and principal organs of a woman; fetus in the womb; the act of coitus; male and female reproductive systems; a fetus, and the muscles attached to the pelvis. important to visual artists to understand the underlying structures of the body in order to depict human subjects more realistically. To this end, artists con ducted their own dissections—more, some say, than the anatomists of the era. Artists also often used wax in their representations, especially in the crafting of three-dimensional écorchés—skinless figures demonstrating musculature—as studies for finished works. Among the best-known écorchés is Ludovico Cardi’s, known as La bella notomia (The Beautiful Anatomy) or Lo scorticato (The Flayed), made around 1600 in Florence. Its immense popularity has led to numerous casts being made from his prototype in bronze and plaster ever since. Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–88) offlorence was the first known artist to make practical use of wax écorchés for study in art schools. AV_00966_pre-pdf layout_001_215.indd 42 12/01/2016 12:14 chapter one[1]
(43) Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)—del Verrocchio’s most famous student—is said to have dissected more than one hundred bodies, and famously ‘sketched cadavers he had dissected with his own hand’ (Vasari, 1991). Da Vinci had ambi tions to publish a 120-volume set of his anatomical works in conjunction with Marc’ Antonio della Torre (1481–1511), Professor of Anatomy at Padua and Pavia Universities, but the project was abandoned after the latter’s untimely death. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), Da Vinci’s younger contemporary, studied anatomy in Florence for twelve years, and is said to have accepted a commission for the Church of the Holy Ghost on the condition that he was paid in cadavers. fig. 24 Écorché (a study of the human muscles without skin) in pen and ink, by Ludovico Cardi (1559–1613), known as Il Cigoli. fig. 25 Michelangelo Buonarotti’s preparatory sketch of the Libyan Sibyl for the Sistine chapel (1510–11). fig. 24 fig. 25 It was Flemish professor of surgery and anatomy at Padua University, Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) who revolutionized the study of anatomy at this time. His monumental work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) was lavishly illustrated with woodcuts thought to be by Titian’s studio in Venice. This masterwork was published in 1543—the same year as Copernicus’s controversial publication De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which described the planets’ rota tion around the Sun and debunked the canonical belief that the entire cosmos revolved around Earth. Both books marked dramatic paradigm shifts in their respective disciplines, and questioned beliefs that had been founded on faith rather than empirical observation. oVerleaF L’Ange Anatomique (The Flayed Angel) (1746), a mezzotint of a beautiful, fashionably coiffed anatomized woman, by Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty, a pioneer of medical colour mezzotint printing. AV_00966_pre-pdf layout_001_215.indd 43 12/01/2016 12:14 THE BIRTH OF THE anaTOmIcal VEnUS[1]
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