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Kaushik Patowary
Jun 2, 2016
3 comments
These beautiful wax models of sensuous women lying supine, with their heads tipped back, and lips parted in ecstasy, look like they are from a renaissance painting. One idly toys with her plait of golden hair, while another clutches at a satin cushion. One is crowned with a golden tiara, while another wears a string of pearls around her neck. Yet, each and everyone of them has their abdomen slashed open causing their innards and guts to spill out.
These bizarre beauties called “Anatomical Venuses” were created by sculptor Clemente Susini in the late eighteenth century, and were conceived as a means to teach human anatomy without the need for dissecting real human bodies which was disgusting and messy. Susini’s uncannily lifelike wax models, often adorned with real human hair, were both anatomically accurate and profoundly artistic, drawing praise from both doctors and art historians from all around. During his illustrious career as a
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. 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. Until then, waxworks were largely confined to life-size effigies of saints and anatomical ex-votos, sometimes depicting limbs and organs. The art historian Aby Warburg thought that the individualised portrait that emerged in the Renaissance built on this ‘fetishism of the waxwork cult’. In the 18th century wax began to be used by artists working in tandem with anatomists for scientific purposes.