![]() In the 21st Century, they also confound, flickering on the edges of medicine and myth, votive and vernacular, fetish and fine art,” she writes in her opening chapter. “Since their creation in late-18th-Century Florence, these wax women have seduced, intrigued, and instructed. ![]() Ebenstein aims to place them in their cultural context, looking at the history of the anatomical Venus and finding out where it fits in the 21st Century. These are waxworks that both intrigue and repulse: models that seem to hover somewhere between freak show and operating theatre. ![]() No grinning faces to be photographed in selfies no celebrity glamour or statesmanlike poses. “One idly toys with a plait of real golden human hair another clutches at the plush, moth-eaten satin cushions of her case as her torso erupts in a spontaneous, bloodless auto-dissection another is crowned with a golden tiara, while one further wears a silk ribbon tied in a bow around a dangling entrail.” (Credit: Museo di Storia Naturale Università di Firenze, Zoologica, ‘La Specola’, Italy/Photo Joanna Ebenstein) “Supine in their glass boxes, they beckon with a gentle smile or an ecstatic downcast gaze,” writes Ebenstein in The Anatomical Venus. She spawned numerous copies, referred to as Slashed Beauties or Dissected Graces and also displayed in medical museums. Also known as ‘the Medici Venus’, the life-size wax figure has real human hair, and can be dissected into seven anatomically correct layers. (Credit: Josephinum, Collections and History of Medicine, MedUni Vienna/Photo Joanna Ebenstein)Ĭreated between 17, the original anatomical Venus by Clemente Susini (pictured) can still be seen at La Specola – the public science museum founded by Leopold II in Florence. This Anatomical Venus, produced by the workshop at La Specola in Florence between 17, is displayed in her original rosewood and Venetian glass case at the Josephinum, Vienna, Austria. Her book () reveals how a figure that provokes an uneasy reaction in viewers now was once a popular tool for instruction. “They do say something different to us today from what they meant at the time,” says Joanna Ebenstein, co-founder of () in New York. Yet to do so is to misunderstand them, says the author of a new book. Our natural reaction is to recoil with disgust, to dismiss these eerie waxworks as freak show objects. A tiny foetus, its foot kicking out of a womb an intestine piled up next to a lifeless figure, her torso ripped open from the string of pearls on her neck to her abdomen.
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