Joanna Ebenstein’s book The Anatomical Venus was published in 2016 and I bought my copy several years ago from London and I started working on the presentation several months ago, but finally I am ready to publish my story about this fascinating book. Even though my road with the book was a long one, I am not late. The book is still available.
Joanna Ebenstein has written (or participated) anatomy or death related books that I have covered already earlier on my blog. She is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, photographer and a creator of Morbid Anatomy blog among other things. Her book, The Anatomical Venus, has been sitting on my book shelf waiting to be covered on my blog. Sometimes it’s very hard to start studying a book of your own interests. You are itching to read it and write about it, but you keep postponing it. I don’t know if anyone else has this kind of “problem”. It’s the same with music. Once I bought DVDs of an artist that I adore and love more than anyone else, but it took a year until I was ready to watch the last one of my purchases. I guess it’s about a question of reverence. If you talk about a book you want to write about, you wonder if you are good enough to do the job, are you able to present the qualities of the book. I didn’t rush with my writing. I knew that my story won’t have any value regarding book sales as it was released many years ago, but I might still reach a potential reader, who had missed it in 2016.
I didn’t know very much about Anatomical Venuses, so I was really interested in starting to read the book. I mean, I know the purpose of them, but I have seen only one with my own eyes, I guess. And that was a very small one in Wellcome Collection in London. I cannot say, if it was the one that you can see on the left or not, but I remember it being very similar to that one.
But I am sort of familiar with anatomical wax models. I went to see an anatomical waxworks exhibition (the Anatomical Panopticon) twice during the years when a collection of wax models made in the workshop of Rudolf Pohl (1852–1926) in Dresden was in the Finnish ownership. There were over 140 items in the exhibition. The other ceroplastician behind the wax works was Emil Kotschi. How I wish I would have back then the same interest towards anatomy than I have nowadays. I mean, I was interested in the exhibition, but I was watching it with different eyes as I would have watched it nowadays.
Anyway, what I remember is that the wax models were very natural. In fact, too natural as the one of delivering baby was too much for me: I almost fainted and had to leave (that’s why I went to see later again, as I wanted to see the rest of the exhibition). The Anatomical Panopticon was later acquired by Deutsches Hygiene-Museum. (Read more here about the adventures of the exhibition.)
I wanted to mention this collection as several works from the workshop of Rudolph Pohl are included in Ebenstein’s book. One of them is this Wax Anatomical Venus from about 1930. (The press photos were sent as two separate images, but I show them here together as they are shown in the book, too, even though the Venus is on horizontal position in the book).
The first full-sized female anatomical wax models were created in the early 18th century. The first chapter in Ebenstein’s book is about the Anatomical Venuses in general, the birth of them, how they were made, the scientific and cultural context, and about perhaps the most famous of them, the Medici Venus that was made under Clemente Susini’s oversight in early 1780’s. Ebenstein writes:
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, in a wax workshop in Florence, a life-sized, anatomically correct, dissectible goddess of coloured wax was created. Artist and master ceroplastician Clemente Susini (1754–1814) took the idealized feminine beauty for which Italian artists had long been renowned in an ambitious new direction, and to hyper-realistic lengths. The result – an Anatomical Venus known as the ‘Medici Venus’ or the ‘Demountable Venus’ – is a masterwork of human ingenuity; the product of a mystic marriage between art, science, and metaphysics. (Ebenstein, p. 24)
The Medici Venus – that is also the most accomplished Anatomical Venus ever made – is dissectible into seven layers and when going into further inside her, you find out that she is pregnant. At her own time, her purpose was to be used as a mean of teaching anatomy and several copies were made of her. Nowadays she can be seen also as a beautiful work of art, but obviously that was a case already when she was created:
The Medici Venus was a perfect embodiment of the Enlightenment values of her time, in which human anatomy was understood as a reflection of the world and the pinnacle of divine knowledge, and in which to know the human body was to know the mind of God. (Ibid.)
If you got interested, please read Rebecca Messbarger’s study ‘The Re-Birth of Venus in Peter Leopold’s Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History’ here.
The Medici Venus was created in the workshop of a public museum, the Reale Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale (Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History; that’s only one version of the name of the museum that I’ve seen around, there are also differences regarding the opening date) The museum was founded by Grand Duke of Tuscany, the enlightened ruler, Leopold II. In the background there was a thought of educate people. The plan was to collect all the “scientific” collections (in the Medici Wunderkammern) in the area and bring them under one roof. The museum opened its doors on 21 February 1775. Marta Poggesi writes in Encyclopaedia Anatomica that it became one of the most important museums of its day (Poggesi, p. 7). Later it was known simply by a name “La Specola”.
The court physician of Leopold II and natural philosopher Felice Fontana (1730–1805, also known as Felix Fontana and occupation is also mentioned as a court physicist; but as Fontana was a man of many skills, in physics as well as in physiology and filled a chair in philosophy in Pisa, it seems that everything goes) oversaw the creation of the museum and he also stayed the director of the museum until his death. Ebenstein writes that Fontana’s aim was to create an encyclopaedia of the human body in wax. This would bring human anatomy to accessible and understandable to the general public and as Marta Poggesi writes, his ambition was “to produce as many fax figures as possible in order to create a teaching recource which would in the future obviate the need to exhume corpses for the study of the human anatomy” (Poggesi, p. 15).
But cadavers were needed during the manufacture of the figures. They were delivered from the Santa Maria Nuova hospital that was located close to the workshop. Poggesi writes that according to the archives, over two hundred corpses or parts of a corpse were needed to make a single wax figure. The reason was that the corpses had to be used as fresh as possible as there were no means to freeze them. She writes that the scientific perfection of the works that were produced, could hardly be surpassed. (Poggesi, pp. 14, 17)
After the moulds had been removed, each item would be cleaned and finished, that is to say, equipped with the relevant organs, vessels, nerves and so on until it was complete; a final coating of clear varnish lent the whole a suitable glossy appearance. To ensure that the models were completely accurate each stage had to be supervised by the anatomists who were also responsible for deciding on how to place certain organs so that they might be seen to best advantage. (Ibid., 20).
After Fontana’s death the wax workshop continued producing wax models and even after Clemente Susini died in 1814, other wax sculptors continued the work. Workshop was finally closed in the end of the 19th century.
I realized only now when I started working on the presentation of The Anatomical Venus that the collection in La Specola is still very useful in a current days: I am using the book about the collection, when I need to check something anatomy related.
The use of wax in religious and scientific purposes
The chapter two takes a look at sacred and scientific uses of wax. The first part of the chapter is about the religious use of wax, all the way from beeswax candles (as liturgical candles are traditionally made of that material) to life-like manufactured saints that still can be seen in some Catholic churches. Ebenstein writes that “these religious effigies had a great impact on the visual language of the scientific anatomical wax models that followed”. (Ebenstein, p. 81)
In the caption (in the book) for the image below, known by a name Home ex humo (man from the dust) it is said that
[t]his meditation on the creation of man incorporates both biblical and scientific perspectives. The creation of Adam by God is depicted in the centre, framed by illustrations of fetal development, almost certainly based on Ruysch’s tableaux. (p. 92)
Ebenstein gives in this chapter more space for two individuals, Dutch artist and anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731) and Italian wax artist Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (1656–1701). The picture above is from Wellcome Collection and on their website it’s said in production credits that the figures of the ornamental border are originally from ‘Thesaurus Anatomicus’, vol 6, p. 31-2, by Frederick Ruysch, 1744. and etched by Cornelis Huyberts (also known as Cornelis Huijberts, source).
Ebenstein writes that “Ruysch exploited the religious and proto-scientific overlap” (p. 89). He is best known for his tableaux that were made using real human fetal skeletons, gallstones and of human tissue. And they were full of symbols. However, I keep this Ruysch part very short as a book about him will be released in September, I think, and I cannot wait to write about it. Anyway, Ruysch had studied at Leiden’s anatomical theatre in the Netherlands. Ebenstein writes that maybe Ruysch had got some inspiration for his constructions from the anatomical theatre that also housed for example human and animal skeletons.
I feel that Ruysch’s work is included in the book to give contemporary cultural context to the world that started produce Anatomical Venuses. Ruysch and Zumbo had, as Ebenstein writes, “a similar intermingling of memento mori and science, art and medicine”. When Ruysch used in his work material of human origin, Zumbo used wax to create his teatrini, small scale dioramas, “Theatres of Death”. There are several pictures of them in Ebenstein’s book, but unfortunately none of them is included in the press material I have. But I found one (that is also in the book) that is available for free use. (Please click the image to enlarge it.)
Even though the glass reflects a picture on the opposite wall, you get an idea about Zumbo’s work. This one is called Il Trionfo del Tempo, The Triumph of Time, “Time” being the old winged man. He is also the only living creature in the scene. The diorama includes also a tiny portrait of the artist himself resting at the heel of the figure of Time. You find a better image of this and many other works by Zumbo here.
Zumbo worked shortly with a French surgeon Guillaume Desnoues, who wanted Zumbo to make a life-sized wax likeness of a woman, whose body had already started to decompose.
It is said that Desnoues was not quite happy with the result blaming that Zumbo had created a “half-putrefied corpse in wax”, when the idea was, as Ebenstein had quoted, to commission “the anatomy of the human body in relief without exciting the feeling of horror men usually have upon seeing corpses.” (p. 97) Ebenstein continues that
the collaboration between Zumbo and Desnoues set the language for wax anatomies to come in the creation of idealized wax bodies that seemed to be either freshly dead, in a state of suspended animation, or alive. This approach was pivotal in making anatomical study more acceptable and appealing, and less frightening or disgusting, to the general public. It gave rise to a flowering of anatomical models in Italy, mostly created for public edification and entertainment, up until the early twentieth century. (Ibid.)
Before I continue to the next chapter, I want to mention one more thing from the chapter two; the Anatomy Room at the Museum of Palazzo Poggi that is located in Bologna. I don’t have an official press photo of that place either, but as the Anatomy Room is well presented in the book with some great photos, and because it’s a beautiful place, I searched for a photo that I could show you.
The Institute of Science at Palazzo Poggi had been founded in 1711. The Enlightenment Pope, Pope Benedict XIV expanded the Institute and provided the Anatomy Room and its anatomical wax models, “whose purpose was to teach artists, medics, and the general public about the divinely rational structure of the human body”. (Ebenstein, p. 106)
The wax works were created between 1742 and 1751 by artist Ercole Lelli with a help by Giovanni Manzolini. The four life-sized anatomical figures were built on human skeletons. They are flanked by Adam and Eve. Eve can be seen on the right on the picture above.
Anatomical Venus as a part of leisure activities
The third chapter, ‘Venus at the Fairground’ covers things from earlier public dissections during pre-Lent Carnival festivities (as held e.g. in Bologna, more about that in this study) to later amusements in industrial societies in Europe and the States coming all the way to current days in the shape of the history of the famous CPR doll Resusci Anne (or Annie, which form is also used sometimes) and a silent Spanish film Blancanieves from 2012 that seems to be continuation to the fairground’s “women in glass boxes” entertainments.
Ebenstein writes that the “Anatomical Venus was one of the most popular and lasting spectacles involving the simulation of a dead or anatomized body” (p. 130). They were also seen as a possible solution for the body snatching (digging relatively fresh bodies from their graves to be sold to anatomists for dissections). Plus, the Anatomical Venus’s scientific purpose (bringing a human anatomy to common people) provided a legitimizing frame through which the naked body could be viewed, as Ebenstein continues. She starts the chapter by pointing out how the ideas regarding viewing dead and dying have changed during the centuries and that the Anatomical Venus was just one of many representations that played on the familiarity with death, and at the same time there was involved the passive eroticism in this inert female body.
In the early- to mid-nineteenth century a change from the agrarian society to urban, industrial society had taken place and “members of the working class and burgeoning middle class had more free time and expendable income to pursue a variety amusements”, as Ebenstein writes. One of the attractions was the ‘panopticon’, a display focusing “on the exotic and with an air of scientific objectivity” that fell “somewhere between aristocratic cabinets of curiosity and modern museums, displaying anatomical and pathological waxworks, human specimens, death masks of celebrities and murderers, ethnographic busts [—]” and so on for general public. There were also popular anatomical museums that focused on displays of human anatomy and pathology. (pp. 131, 140) One major tourist attraction was the Paris Morgue from the 19th century to 1907. There the visitors could see real human corpses.
“The line between scientific museum exhibit and fairground entertainment is often blurred” (picture caption on page 127). The Anatomical Panopticon exhibition that I went to see here in Finland, belongs to that category. In the leaflet that I have it is mentioned that in the beginning of the 20th century it was touring in the big European cities (there is no mention if it ever had a permanent home) and it was allowed for ladies’ eyes only on Friday afternoons. According to the leaflet, the motto of the exhibition was (translated from Finnish from the leaflet as I don’t have the original text), “Human, learn to know yourself!” So, obviously it had educational purpose. But later, here in Finland, it was touring more or less as a “curiosity” exhibition. (On the black and white brochure it is described as “ihmenäyttely” that can be translated as a “wonder exhibition”.) This reminds me of Pierre Spitzner’s exhibition that is mentioned in the book.
Spitzer was a French self-styled doctor who had a medical museum in Paris (opened in 1856) and after a fire destroyed the location of t he collection, it was shown at fairgrounds around Europe. There were for example wax models that demonstrates e.g. “ravages of alcoholism and venereal disease, particularly syphilis, which was raging across Europe” (p. 149). The collection is nowadays at the University of Montpellier. It showed also an Anatomical Venus that was dissectible into forty pieces. The cover image of this book shows so called Venus Endormie (Sleeping Venus), a mechanized waxwork, from Sptizner’s collection. The breast of the figure was rising and falling as it was breathing (see the photo of the book cover in the end of the article).
On the right you see another “breathing” wax model, the Sleeping Beauty by Swiss physician and master wax sculptor Philippe Curtius. (In the book the this is shown head down, but on the Morbid Anatomy’s website, the picture is displayed this way.) This model in the picture is a replica from 1925, as the original one has been destroyed by the fire. The replica is cast from the same mould than the original one from 1767. The caption in the book quotes Marina Warner (Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century): “The illusion of permanent sleep is invoked to deny the reality of death…The Sleeping Beauty functions an anti-memento mori … she promises immortality as the suspension of time.” (p. 175)
Popular anatomical museums were close to the panopticon and besides real human specimens they also had man-made models. Not all of these popular anatomical museums had their own buildings, but they travelled the fairground circuits. The items that were on display seem to have had lots of curiosity value. And…
[s]exual hygiene and the organs of generations were a strong focus of these displays, as were the erotic and exotic. At a time when nudity was considered unsuitable for display unless it was ‘furnished with moral claims’, the veneer of anatomical study provided just that. In addition to waxes depicting the male and female genitalia, there might also be tableaux depicting gorilla ravishing a pretty girl, odalisques in boxes, or a monstrous beast atop the torso of a swooning, bare-breasted woman, inspired by Fuseli’s famous painting The Nightmare (1781). (p. 141)
The life-sized tableau shown a monkey-like creature sitting on a top of a woman, made by wax modeler Emil Eduard Hammer (1865–1938) was exhibited at Hammer’s panopticon in Munich. The work got inspiration from the painting by Henry Fuseli (below) by the same name.
The two remaining chapters are much shorter than the first three and the names of the chapters are ‘Ecstasy, fetishism, and doll worship’ and ‘Venus, the uncanny, and the ghost in the machine’. The fourth chapter is dealing first the essential nature of ecstasy. “The Medici Venus’s enigmatic expression and swooning posture are suggestive of ecstasy, which today is understood sexual.” (p. 180) But that’s not always been the case, but it has had a sacred, mystical meaning, too; it has been understood to be both, sexual and religious. No wonder that author has included the famous sculpture by Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, in the chapter. That sculpture may cause confusion if you try to understand it from a modern perspective.
Back to the Venus. Ebenstein writes: “In the case of the Medici Venus, her ecstatic attitude invites men of science to penetrate the secrets of Nature, and thus to take the place of the divine creator.” (p. 185) On the following page there is a picture of the famous painting by Enrique Simonet y Lombardo called Anatomy of the heart (originally it was called She had a heart!). The work is not analysed in the book, but I suggest you read here an interesting text that is taken from Javier Moscoso’s book, Pain: A Cultural History. Is that an anatomist just studying the heart of the young woman, or is there something else going on in the painting? Is the situation similar than said above about the Medici Venus?
And it’s only natural that the next theme that the book is dealing with is fetishism, particularly sexual fetishes via some examples about people living with preserved bodies or life-sized effigies.
The last chapter is more or less like an epilogue, where the pivotal word is the uncanny. There are a couple of definitions of “uncanny”. I want to close my book presentation with this one by Terry Castle (from the book The Female Thermometer, published in 1995):
Doubles, dancing dolls and automata, waxwork figures, alter egos and ‘mirror selves’, spectral emanations…What makes them uncanny is precisely the way they subvert the distinction between the real and the phantasmatic – plunging us instantly, and vertiginously, into the hag-riddled world of the unconscious. (p. 210)
The 224-page The Anatomical Venus is a richly illustrated, hardcover book, where pictures have the leading role. The book was published already in 2016, but it’s still easily available. In the States it was published by Distributed Art Publishers with different cover and with a subtitle. (Check it on Morbid Anatomy’s website.) My copy is a European version, if you like, published by Thames and Hudson (see here).
I had expectations before I had even read the introduction, and The Anatomical Venus didn’t let me down.
Text © Katriina Etholén
Additional source:
Marta Poggesi, ‘The Wax Figure Collection in “La Specola” in Florence’ in Encyclopaedia Anatomica, Taschen 2014.
If you got interested in the book, there is a 54 min. long discussion about the book that you can watch on YouTube.
When talking about YouTube, there is an interesting video, provided by Wellcome Collection, about making an anatomical wax model.
Tales From The Brazier's Grotto 