Anatomical Venus

“The images we humans make of ourselves are like mirrors.

What we see in them depends on who we are.”

—from the entry text to the San Francisco Exploratorium’s

Revealing Bodies exhibit, March-September 2000

Her toes curved delicately. No creases lined her feet. One heel was attached to the opposite ankle as her feet rested on a mauve silk handkerchief with golden fringe.

Her torso gaped open from pubis to collarbone. Inside the cavity, her fallopian tubes lay deflated across scraps of intestine. Her uterus was larger than my fist — maybe as big as both fists put together. I wondered if she was pregnant.

Her heart, laid open, revealed its chambers. The main vein and artery were big enough to insert my fingers, as I’d seen done in a cadaver lab. A segment of lung draped her liver, which had escaped dissection. Her huge kidneys lay much higher in her body than I expected.

The glossiness of the organs disturbed me less than the sheen of her limbs. No hairs or muscles defined them. Even though she’d taught medicine for more than two hundred years, she remained smooth and perfectly feminine.

Her pink lips parted to hint at teeth. She had a long, straight Italian nose. The faintest blush colored her cheeks. Her feathery eyelashes were real hair, individually inset by hand. The braid trailing across her left arm looked very dark in contrast. The rest of her locks had faded unevenly, almost blond in places.

Her half-closed eyes looked dusty, definitely glazed and dead. Perhaps it was easier to examine her like this, unconscious or dead, rather than alert and aware.

The Exploratorium’s Revealing Bodies exhibited 150 artifacts, artworks, and interactive objects, including a wax model of a syphilitic tongue from Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, sections of plastinated humans (on huge leaves, so you could page through them), and many more treasures. The centerpiece of the investigation of the cross-pollination between art and medicine, a seven-layer Medical Venus had been cast in wax from an estimated 200 dissections. She’d never before traveled out of Italy.

I fell in love with the Venus, lying like Snow White in her glass coffin. I bought a membership to the museum just so I could visit her again.

During the exhibition’s six-month run, the Exploratorium pioneered live web casts. Revealing Bodies’ curator Melissa Alexander hosted a live tour of the Venus’s home museum in Florence, Italy — Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Universita di Firenze Sezione di Zoologia, known as ‘La Specola’ — the oldest public science museum in Europe. I gaped in awe of the place.

Late in the eighteenth century, Pietro Leopoldo di Lorena, Grand Duke of Tuscany, decided to build a museum of natural history in Florence to showcase items collected by generations of Medici. After gathering a variety of new specimens, including taxidermied animals, the museum opened in 1771. Four years later, the Grand Duke opened the museum to the general public.

Originally, the Grand Duke did not favor dissecting cadavers. After he viewed the exquisite craftsmanship of Clement Susini, the most brilliant sculptor in wax of the time, Duke Pietro Leopoldo consented to dissection if it created anatomical models for teaching medicine. The Duke financed a laboratory next to the museum expressly for the purpose of sculpting the waxes. With help from Giuseppe Fernini, Susini created my Venus. Felice Fontana, the museum’s first director, pioneered teaching anatomy without dissection.

To create one model, several cadavers were prepared in sequence, sculpted in clay, cast in plaster, and then the wax was poured in. Words cannot do justice to the delicacy of the work, the nuances of color. I’d never seen anything — never imagined anything — like them. Someday I hoped to see more of them in person.

*

The January after Revealing Bodies closed, my husband Mason suggested we spend our fifteenth anniversary in Italy. Our vacations had fallen into a comfortable pattern by this point: I read the guidebooks and decided what we were going to see; he handled the maps, money, and languages: each to their strengths.

When we began to talk about Italy, Rome was a given. We had to see the Capuchin Catacombs, the Pantheon, and the Protestant Cemetery. Pompeii was required. After that, things seemed nebulous…until I located La Specola in the Access Guide to Florence and Venice. The guidebook listed visiting hours. We were on our way.

As Mason and I traveled around Italy, we made a point to visit the most intriguing site in each city on our first day. That way, if we found something closed, we could rearrange our schedule. The thing I’d set my heart on in Florence was La Specola.

The museum was relatively easy to find. We crossed the Ponte Vecchio, still selling jewelry as it did in Michelangelo’s day, and headed toward the Pitti Palace. The Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Universita di Firenze Sezione di Zoologia occupied a nondescript blond brick building: not the most welcoming place. We entered through an archway, crossed a shadowy courtyard, climbed a flight of steep stone steps abuzz with students. Although the natural history museum’s collections occupied all five floors, only the second was open to the public.

It wasn’t clear how we bought a ticket to see just the anatomy specimens, so we paid a little more than three Euros for the entire zoological section. The path wound us through the taxidermy collection, which we didn’t give appropriate attention. Among its offerings stood a taxidermied hippo, who had been allowed to roam the Boboli Gardens before its demise. We also saw the skeleton of a dodo, but it might have been a model. Its label was in Italian.

Finally, dead animals out of our way, we reached the anatomical collection: 1400 pieces, the English introductory placard said, all sculpted between 1771 and second half of 1800s. Five hundred and fifty showcases spanned ten rooms. 

I hadn’t considered what that number of specimens would look like on display. Cases of anatomical sections crowded the rooms: ringing the walls in upright boxes like china cabinets or standing in glass-enclosed tables on the floor. Framed sketches on yellowing paper climbed the walls. Even with my experiences in the dissection lab, even with my rudimentary understanding of human anatomy, this was too much to take in.

I focused on externals first. Beneath wavery glass, the beautiful cases had wood inlaid in patterns of light and fire. No one would bother to do such remarkable workmanship in a modern museum. All the wax models had lovely napkins behind them, ivory satin edged in silver braid with a tassel or two below.

Unfortunately, their age showed in a lot of places. The exquisite veneer peeled off some of the cabinets. Several of the white satin napkins highlighting the smaller pieces were falling to threads. Fraying mattresses supported the full figures. One of the reclining models oozed, leaving an oily stain on his cushion.

I studied the wax artworks we’d come to see. Each room held between sixty and ninety specimens. They ranged from very small finger dissections or pieces of pathological organs to life-size full-body reclining figures.

The lymphatic room overwhelmed me with its collection of legs stripped down to their internal vessels. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to dissect to that level: where all the flesh was removed until only blood vessels remained. Logically, the veins should collapse against the bone, not float in three-dimensional space as these did. I felt surrounded by marvels of medical science. Someone must have been drawing as someone else wielded the knife: that alone impressed me. But then to make a wax model that would retain the tracery and not collapse for the next two hundred years…

Here and there amidst the showcases sat little desks with a single curved board on which to rest your right arm. These were meant for medical students who wanted to sketch, but I availed myself of one and pulled out my notebook. The only way to slow down enough to grasp what I saw was to transmute the evidence of my eyes into words.

The fellow I chose to sit beside disturbed me more than all the others in the room, if only because his eyelids had been removed. His wide brown eyes stared upward, pupils slightly glazed. His mouth hung open just enough to reveal yellowed teeth. Unlike my lovely Venus, this Adonis didn’t appear dead or sleeping, but tormented. A victim. He appeared aware he had been flayed.

What had the artist been thinking? He’d intentionally captured the look of horror in the man’s eyes, the agony. Had it amused him to think that medical students were going to study this model for centuries to come? Had he meant recognition of the victim’s pain to be a teaching moment?

Even as I puzzled over it, I had to admire the sculptor’s accomplishment. The lymphatic model stood fully three-dimensional. If the glass hadn’t been there, I could have run my fingers over him, tracing where every tendon connected to each bone.

Flung up over his head, one arm sprawled on a threadbare mauve cushion. A large vein like a fat blue worm branched off from his jugular to wind across his upper arm to the elbow.

I drew back to notice the web of tiny white filaments tracing over him like vermicelli. I believe they represented lymph vessels, since they seemed to emanate from little brown nodules at his elbow and in his armpit. The remains of a caul folded back from his heart’s lumpy surface. Mason pointed out the bow of ivory ribbon tying off his intestine.

Along the model’s thighs lay the round white globes of his testes. I realized I found the severed penises around the room more disquieting than the real thing. I hadn’t seen any in the museum that had been peeled, but several were severed to the root so that only a round tube led out of the bladder. This guy’s penis had been tucked down between his thighs, behind his testes.

While I wrote, a gaggle of schoolchildren followed a teacher into the room. She kept shushing them and apologized to me when the boys clustered around, fascinated by the tattoo on my forearm. Amused that they found a live American woman more interesting than the memento mori around us, I wished we had a common language. Instead, we exchanged smiles.

After the school kids moved on, in came a German family with a boy too young for school. He kept asking his mom, “What’s this?”

“That’s the liver,” she’d reply patiently.

“What’s this?”

“That’s the abdomen.”

I wondered if either learned anything from the surfeit of anatomical details surrounding them.

Mason came back to get me. “This is going to upset you,” he promised.

“What’s that?”

“There’s an obstetrical room around the corner.”

What an amazing collection. A sign said that this room contained the only known mistakes in the museum: Because they didn’t have microscopes and because they couldn’t chop women open at every stage of pregnancy to check development of the fetus, the board discussing fetal development displayed all the fetuses as perfectly formed newborns of varying sizes. “Homunculus theory,” Mason reported.

In this room lay the Venus I’d adored in San Francisco. At La Specola, she had most of her skin in place, with only her breasts and belly lifted off. I discovered she was indeed pregnant. Her womb opened to reveal the fetus inside.

Nearby, a case held an anonymous torso, lopped off at mid-thigh and just below the breastbone. Beyond her gender, she had no identifying features at all. Her opened abdomen revealed a pair of twins, almost at term, knees curled to each other’s forehead, a yin-yang of death. These were two of the most beautiful blond children I had ever seen, lacking only wings to be cherubs. A loop of umbilical cord twisted around each of their necks.

I realized I was looking at the remains of three corpses. The mother must have died on the brink of delivery. In the days before refrigeration or embalming, these two little angel corpses and their anonymous mother had been sculpted immediately after their deaths. The tableau was horrible. And beautiful.

Abruptly, I reached saturation point. It was time to get on with enjoying life in Florence on this sunny May morning. First, we needed to support the museum by buying a book and some postcards. Unfortunately the Tachen guidebook only came in Italian. It didn’t really matter. I wasn’t buying the book for its text. I made certain it contained a photo of the madonna and her twin cherubs.

The second order of business was lunch. Around the corner from the museum, I ordered my first ever plate of gnocchi al pesto, which was marvelous. I enjoyed that bottle of Pironi more than any beer in my life.