An Ode to an Anatomical Venus: Waxing Poetic on the Uncanny Allure of 18th Century Dissectible Women

An Ode to an Anatomical Venus: Waxing Poetic on the Uncanny Allure of 18th Century Dissectible Women

by Joanna Ebenstein / 14 Feb 2013 

 

"Anatomical Venus," wax wodel with human hair and pearls in rosewood and Venetian glass case, "La Specola" (Museo di Storia Naturale), Florence, Italy; Probably modeled by Clemente Susini (around 1790)

An essay from collector, photographer, artist, and friend of the Atlas Obscura, Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy about her love of the Wax Anatomical Venus.

Much of my artwork, scholarship, and work with the Morbid Anatomy Blog and Library revolves around the luxuriously bizarre Anatomical Venus, a kind of female wax anatomical model popularized in the 18th century. Over the past six years, I have made it my goal to find — and photograph! — as many of these amazing pieces as possible, and to learn as much as I can about these lovely ladies, with a special eye towards understanding the historical moment in which they rose to prominence as the ideal way to illuminate the anatomy of woman for a popular audience. I was recently invited to contribute an article on this topic to the "Enchantment" special issue of WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly. Below is an excerpt from this piece, "Ode to an Anatomical Venus," and some of my photographs of these wax women. 

The "Venerina" or "Little Venus" anatomical model by Clemente Susini, 1782, as seen at the Palazzo Poggi in Bologna, Italy. Described on the museum website thusly: "The agony of a young woman is represented in her last instant of life as she abandons herself to death voluptuously and completely naked. The thorax and abdomen can be opened, allowing the various parts to be disassembled so as to simulate the act of anatomic dissection."

Clemente Susini’s Anatomical Venus, created around 1790, is the central object of my artistic and scholarly contemplation. She is, in my opinion, the perfect object; one whose luxuriously bizarre existence challenges belief. It — or, better she — was conceived of as a means to teach human anatomy without the need for constant dissection, which was messy, ethically fraught, and subject to quick decay. The Venus also tacitly communicated the relationship between the human body and a divinely created cosmos, between art and science, between nature and mankind as understood in its day.  

Detail of the ”Venerina" (Little Venus) anatomical model by Clemente Susini, 1782, Palazzo Poggi, Bologna, Italy

Referred to also as "The Demountable Venus," this life-sized, dissectible wax woman — who can still be viewed in her original Venetian glass and rosewood case at La Specola Museum of Zoology and Natural History in Florence, Italy, as well as in a number of other European museums — is adorned with glass eyes and human hair and can be dismembered into dozens of parts revealing, at the final remove, a beatific fetus curled in her womb. Her sisters — also anatomical models made under the artistic leadership of Susini, and referred to by such names as "The Slashed Beauty" and "The Dissected Graces" can be visited at a handful of European museums. Supine in their glass boxes, they beckon with a gentle smile or an ecstatic downcast gaze; one idly toys with a plait of real golden human hair; another clutches at the plush, moth-eaten velvet cushions of her case as her torso erupts in a spontaneous, bloodless auto-dissection; another is crowned with a golden tiara, while yet another has a silk ribbon tied in a bow tied around a dangling entrail. 

Anatomical model by Clemente Susini representing "deep lymphatic vessels in a female subject," human hair, wax, 1794, Museum of the History of the University, Pavia, Italy
Since their creation in late-18th century Florence, these wax women have seduced, intrigued, and instructed. Today, they also confound, troubling the edges of our neat categorical divides: life and death, science and art, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, spectacle and education, kitsch and art. They are corporeal martyrs, anatomical odalisques, the uncanny incarnate. These wax models are the pinnacle of "artificial anatomies," a tradition of three-dimensional, anatomical teaching tools stretching back to the turn of the 18th century. The genre came into being around 1700 when Gaetano Giulio Zummo, known as Zumbo, accepted the commission of French surgeon Guillaume Desnoues to create a likeness of an important medical dissection that was beginning to decompose. Zumbo was a Sicilian abbot who delighted in the creation of wax miniature series “Theatres of Death” boasting names such as "The Plague" and "The Vanity of Human Greatness," and featuring exactingly rendered dead and tortured bodies. The product of Desnoues' and Zumbo's collaboration was the first wax anatomical teaching model, and established the tradition of an artistic/medical partnership in the creation of such tools.

"Slashed Beauty" Wax wodel with human hair and pearls in rosewood and Venetian glass case, "La Specola" (Museo di Storia Naturale), Florence, Italy;  Probably modeled by Clemente Susini (around 1790)
The Venus and her sisters were intended, from their very conception, not only to instruct, but also to delight and elicit the wonder of a popular audience and, beginning with their public debut in the 1790s, they did just that, attracting throngs of both local Tuscans and visitors on the Grand Tour circuit. Their popularity was so great that they ultimately inspired a series of knockoffs — first a series of similar models by the same workshop for Napoleon and Joseph II of Vienna and, later, in series of models, often advertised as "Florentine" or "Parisian" or even automated breathing Venuses that toured Europe, attracting masses of visitors to the popular anatomical displays found in Europe well into the 20th century. The uncanny allure of these somnambulant, neither-dead-nor-alive women was not lost on surrealist artists such as Paul Delvaux — who cited his visits to the Spitzner Collection (as seen in his painting "Le Musee Spitzner" of 1943), with its famous breathing Venus as a life and art-changing moment — and Marcel Duchamp, whose enigmatic peepshow Étant donnés seems to have been inspired, at least in part, by the paradoxes embodied by such figures. 

"The Slashed Beauty"Wax model with human hair in rosewood and Venetian Glass case; Probably modeled by Clemente Susini (around 1790), "La Specola" (Museo di Storia Naturale), Florence, Italy
At the time these models were conceived of and created, the anatomy of woman was of great interest, in both the medical and social arenas; the residue of these concerns, as argued by scholar Ludmilla Jordanova in Sexual Visions, can be found in the Anatomical Venus and other anatomical waxes of the era. The anatomy of woman was understood at this time to be the exception to the canonical body of the male: problematic, erratic, and troubling. It was also understood to be intimately tied to the female temperament, which was thought to be sensible (ie, sensitive), nervous, passionate, childlike, passive, and prone to such nervous disorders as hysteria — literally, "wandering womb." Men, in contrast, were understood to be muscular, vigorous, and reasonable. This difference is reflected in the models from the workshop of Susini. Each of his Venuses features a fetus — the raison d’être of woman, after all! — at the last stage of anatomical striptease. And, while male figures can be represented standing or reclining — and more often than not were portrayed completely skinned, demonstrating, say, human musculature — all the female figures are reclining and with their hyper-perfect skin intact, except for the places where the anatomical elements are exposed. The female figure, then, always remains beautiful and, one could argue, sexually desirable, and it is the line between her classic, serene beauty and the abjectness of her innards that adds to her special frisson.  

"Anatomical Venus" Wax wodel with human hair and pearls in rosewood and Venetian glass case, "La Specola" (Museo di Storia Naturale), Florence, Italy; Probably modeled by Clemente Susini (around 1790)
This frisson seemed to be a formula for popular success, so it is no surprise that Susini’s Venus and her sisters were not the first to employ it. Indeed, in 1719, Desnoues, the French surgeon who partnered with Zumbo in the creation of the first anatomical model, exhibited to the public a wax dissectible anatomized woman featuring a newborn child with the umbilical cord still attached. Fourteen years later, the Paris-trained anatomist, surgeon, and modeler Abraham Chovet exhibited in London ‘‘. . . the representation of 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.’’ This ingenious piece demonstrated the circulation of the blood during pregnancy via an network of blown glass tubes coursing with blood-red claret. 
You can read the entire "Ode to an Anatomical Venus" piece by clicking here. 
This piece could simply not exist without the wonderful work of scholars Roberta Ballestriero, Alessandro Riva, Lucia Dacome, Kathryn Hoffmann, Ludmilla Jordanova, Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace, Anna Maerker, Rebecca Messbarger, and Roberta Panzanelli. A much more detailed bibliography and list of citations can be found in the article itself. I am entirely indebted to their work in all of my research on this topic.

"Anatomical Venuses" Wax models with human hair in rosewood and Venetian glass cases; Workshop of Clemente Susini of Florence, 1781-1786 The Josephinum, Vienna, Austria

A Collection of
Curious Facts

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The 16-Inch Waist Of Émilie Marie Bouchaud

In the late 19th century, "tightlacing" among women was in vogue. Émilie Marie Bouchaud or "Polaire" was famous for her tiny, corseted waist, which was reported to have a circumference no greater than 16 inches and at one time measured 14.

The algerian-born singer and actress's striking appearance, both on and off stage, contributed to her celebrity. For her 1910 supposed "debut" in New York she provocatively allowed herself to be billed in the advance publicity as "the ugliest woman in the world" and departing on a transatlantic liner she was apparently accompanied by a "black slave"returning to America in 1913, she brought a diamond-collared pet pig, Mimi, and wore a diamond nose ring. Talk of her figure and her lavish overdressing in fur coats and dazzling jewels preceded her appearances wherever she went.

French poet Jean Lorrain said of her:

"The tiny slip of a woman that you know, with the waist slender to the point of pain, of screaming out loud, of breaking in two, in a spasmically tight bodice, the prettiest slimness ...What a devilish mimic, what a coffee-mill and what a belly-dancer! Yellow skirt tucked high, gloved in open-work stockings, Polaire skips, flutters, wriggles, arches from the hips, the back, the belly, mimes every kind of shock, twists, coils, rears, twirls...trembling like a stuck wasp, miaows, faints to what music and what words! The house, frozen with stupor, forgets to applaud."

 The old tradition of corset-training is alive and well today, although is seen more of an oddity nowadays as opposed to a fashion or extreme version of the norm.

Currently the smallest waist belongs to Cathie Jung (USA, b. 1937), who stands at 1.72 m (5 ft 8 in) and has a corseted waist measuring 38.1 cm (15 in).

The Story of the Stone Child of Sens.

A lithopaedion, or stone-child, is a dead fetus, usually the result of a primary or secondary abdominal pregnancy, that  has been retained by the mother and subsequently calcified. This is the story of the earliest known case of this
phenomenon. It was discovered in 1582, at the autopsy of a 68-year-old woman in the French city of Sens, and described in a thesis by the physician Jean d'Ailleboust. The woman had carried her lithopaedion for 28 years. The ultimate fate of the lithopaedion specimen, which was widely traded throughout Europe in the 1600s before finally ending up in
Copenhagen, is traced.


INTRODUCTION
On May 16 1582, in the city of Sens, the 68-year-old Madame Colombe Chatri breathed her last. She was the wife of Loys Carita, a tailor, described as being of small stature, but otherwise 'bien forme & corpulent'. Twenty-eight years earlier, Madame Chatri had, for the first time, shown signs of pregnancy.

 Her menstruations ceased, her breasts swelled, her stomach increased in size, and she could even feel the child move within her. Some time before her birth was due,
Colombe Chatri was seized by violent labour pains. A great quantity of amniotic fluid, tinged with blood, was passed.
In spite of the predictions of the Sens midwives,


however, there was no childbirth; instead, her labour pains ceased, the movements of the child could no longer be felt, and her breasts diminished in size. Afterwards, Madame Chatri felt quite unwell, and she had to remain in bed for three full years. She could feel a hard tumour of considerable size, situated in the lower abdomen. Until the end of her life, she complained of tiredness, abdominal pains and loss of appetite. Only by means of provoking the appetite with herbs and vinegar sauces could she eat anything at all. When
gossiping with her neighbours in the street, they talked about her strange obstetrical mishap, and there was much speculation that she still had a fetus within her, and that it would kill her one day. Madame Chatri and her husband
consulted several physicians and surgeons, but none of them
could suggest a cure.


THE STONE-CHILD
In 1582, at the age of 68, Madame Chatri was described as being broken down by disease and old age. She died that year, and since there had been much gossip about her mysterious pregnancy many years ago, her husband requested that her body was to be dissected by two skilful surgeons, Claude le Noir and Iehan Couttas.
They cut through the stomach and peritoneum, and viewed the prodigious growth, which was wrinkled and formed like a turkey's crest. It was hard and brittle like a shell, and covered with what seemed like scales. The surgeons
'plunged their razors into it', but without being able to penetrate the hard shell. After wearing out the edge of their knives on the hard tumour, they fetched mauls and a drill, and finally succeeded to break it. They felt the head and right shoulder of the lithopaedion, but it was not until they had broken off a large portion of the covering shell, and seen the wonderful sight inside, that they understood what they were dealing with.
They ran to fetch some physicians, Jean d'Ailleboust among them. He could see a glimpse of the lithopaedion, which was covered by detritus and the remains of its inner membranes, and was as astonished as his surgical colleagues.
All the time, curious townsmen came running in to see this prodigy. The surgeons were busy telling the story, and to demonstrate the infant more clearly, they grasped the opening in the calcified shell with their iron hooks to tear it apart. After tearing with all their force, they broke it open,
and took out the lithopaedion, which they set out to dissect further. This was done with great haste, and Jean d'Ailleboust deplored that they had made it impossible to study closer the anatomy of the calcified shell and the nourishing vessels. The shape of the lithopaedion was roughly that of its rounded, calcified shell. The knees were bent, and the legs drawn up towards the chest. The feet and lower legs were fused by the calcific deposits. It could clearly be seen that the fetus was of the female sex. The head was lightly tilted to the right, and supported by the left arm.
The right arm extended down towards the navel: its hand had been broken off through carelessness when the lithopaedion was extracted. The bones of the head were transparent, and the fontanelles were not closed. The skin of the head was partially covered with hair. The lithopaedion had one sole tooth, situated in the lower jaw.

Not long after it had been delivered, the stone-child of Sens became one of the foremost curiosities of France. People traveled hundreds of miles to see and admire it. Jean d'Ailleboust needed no encouragement to write a thorough
Latin pamphlet about it, detailing the case history of Madame Chatri as well as the autopsy findings1. It was published in 1582, by the Sens printer Jean Sauvine, and soon became a medical best seller.

He also supplied a curious drawing (Figure 1) of the lithopaedion and its 'mother'. It is believed to depict the corpse of Columba Chatri lying on a richly padded bed, her abdomen dissected to show the lithopaedion in situ within its
calcified shell. Beside the bed, the lithopaedion is laid out on a pillow.  This practice was not unknown at the time:

 Although Jean d'Ailleboust was very unwilling to part from his great treasure, it is recorded that, in the late 1500s, it was purchased by a wealthy merchant, Monsieur Prestesiegle, who put it in his famous private museum of curiosities in Paris. It was examined there by Madame Louise Bourgeouis, the leading French midwife of her time5. Later, the lithopaedion was purchased by Etienne Carteron, a wealthy Paris goldsmith. He sold it, in 1628, to Gillebert
Bodey, a jewel merchant of Venice.  In the early 1650s, King Frederick III of Denmark was building up a large cabinet of curiosities at his castle in Copenhagen. In 1653, Frederick III bought the stone-child from its owner.

 The document of sale and certificate signed in 1628 were also turned over to the King, as well as a hand written copy of Jean d'Ailleboust's autopsy report, with a slightly different illustration (Figure 3): they are still kept in the
Royal Library of Copenhagen (Gl kgl Saml No. 1641). The sum paid was a well-kept secret, but it is unlikely that the Franco-Italian merchant let the King have it cheaply, particularly since he had himself paid a very high price for it.  A few years later, Thomas Bartholin described the lithopaedion closer in one of his collections of anatomical anecdotes9. By this time, it had become much the worse for wear, and it is likely that during its years in private hands, the lithopaedion had not always been treated with the reverence due to its age and fragility. Both arms were now broken off, the jaw was injured, and the skin
lacerated (Figure 2b). 


In the illustration (Figure 2c), the miserable-looking specimen is depicted sitting lopsidedly on a box. Part of the missing arm had been refastened, but otherwise, the lithopaedion was unchanged since it was described by Thomas Bartholin. In Jacobsen's 1710 catalogue10, it was more thoroughly described. The skin was now missing in large parts, and where it remained, it was quite black, giving the lithopaedion a strange aspect, as if it had been partly
dressed. 


In the 1820s, the Danish government decided to dissolve the Royal museum, and many preparations were scrapped or sold by public auction. Many bizarre pieces changed hands under these circumstances; among them the hand of a mermaid, solemnly described by Thomas Bartholin 170 years earlier, and an egg allegedly laid by a Norwegian peasant woman12. The lithopaedion was not among the preparations sold or thrown away, probably because it was still considered valuable. In 1826, it was transferred to the Danish Museum of Natural History, along with several other human, animal and vegetable specimens. In the late nineteenth century, the remaining exhibits from the Danish Museum of Natural History were transferred to the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen University, and a good many zoological specimens are still there. However, the lithopaedion had disappeared somewhere along the way,
together with the other medical curiosities from King Frederick's museum, among them a dicephalic child preserved in spirits, and a minute fetus, alleged to be one of the 365 children of the prolific Dutch countess Margaret
of Henneberg. It may well be that the lithopaedion of Sens was scrapped at this time, along with the other older medical specimens, of which no trace remains. An extensive search for them in the existing Danish museums has been fruitless.

A beautiful Latin poem was written by Jean d'Ailleboust in 1582 to celebrate the lithopaedion of Sens. He recalled the classical myth that after the Flood, the world was repopulated by the two survivors, Deucalion and Pyrrha, who walked the earth, throwing stones behind them, which, on striking the ground, became living people:

Pinxit Deucalion saxis post terga repulsis
Ex duro nostrum marmore molle genus:
Qui fit ut infantis, mutata sorte, tenellum
Nunc corpus saxis proxima membra gerat!

From the rocks Deucalion had dropped behind,
was fashioned the living flesh of humankind:
How was it then done, that a tender babe well formed



Information via:

"The earliest known case of a lithopaedion"
Jan Bondeson MD LicSc
J R Soc Med 1996;89:13-18

The Belfry, Oddities and Collectables.

 Recently discovered this little gem.... The Belfry, a pair of curators and collectors of the odd, the creepy and all things macabre run this gorgeous House of Curios. 

A wonderful collection of old religious paraphernalia, antique medical equipment, taxidermy and art are housed in this little shop of treasures, the pricing is very reasonable and many of the antiques are very rare and unusual. 

There is a human skeleton for sale housed in a vintage, unearthed coffin; a Victorian Veterinarian's travel bag  complete with medicines, needles, ID cards and medical documents; complete sets of human teeth; a collection of rare and antique taxidermy; a child-sized embalming table, a collection of Victorian Mourning hair portraits and post-mortem photography, and an assortment of other weird and wonderful delights.

Definitely worth taking a look; the curators are very friendly and knowledgeable, and have a real appreciation for curios and oddities....it's pretty easy to spend a paycheck in this place however...you have been warned!!

Source

Melvin Burkhart, The Original Human Blockhead

Born:  Born 1907 Louisville, KY, Died November 8, 2001 Gibsonton, Florida. Biography: From his obit(Associated Press): TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - Magician Melvin Burkhart, known in the heyday of carnivals as ``The Human Blockhead'' for his ability to hammer a spike into his head through a cavity behind his nostril, died Thursday. He was 94.  Burkhart could make both sides of his face do different things, and he could squeeze into enough shapes to be known as ``The Anatomical Wonder.'' ``He was 60 years in the sideshows, and he's the last of them,'' said friend and magician Bill Dahlquist. ``It's the end of the era, it really is. It's sad.'' Burkhart recently was in New York to trade stories with friends and to perform at a wedding. When he returned home, he checked into a hospital, and shortly afterward suffered a stroke. He had time for private goodbyes before his heart gave out.   ``He taught me how to be a rich man,'' said his son, Dennis Burkhart, a biochemical engineer. ``He said a rich man is someone who can make one person smile everyday. If I can be half the man my father has been, I will be a great man.''  The elder Burkhart and his wife, Joyce, with whom he had three children, were to celebrate their 52nd anniversary this month. ``He did what everybody else always talked about doing,'' said daughter-in-law Jane Burkhart. ``He ran away and joined the circus.''

from James Taylor (excerpt of an unpublished essay, "How I Spent My Carny Vacation," 1998): You've seen the act before, though the horrific elements of it probably had you wondering, "Why in the hell would anybody do that?" more than, "Who came up with that act?" Human Blockhead or just Blockhead, the act's straightforward and frightening: The performer takes a hammer, a bottle, the microphone, whatever, and with a maniacal laugh proceeds to pound a spike as big as your finger right into the middle of his head. Well, that's right up his nose. Maybe you saw the blockhead push an ice pick up his sinuses. Regardless, whether you saw it with those implements or others, when the act's done for comedy, a stand-alone act for the gross-out stand-up, it's origins are traceable to Gibtown. Specifically, to Melvin Burkhart, the Anatomical Wonder. The man Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley dubbed the Human Blockhead. The man who took a pretty gruesome piece of fakir performance, made it even more gruesome, and then made it comic.  Melvin's done the act a million times. Taught it to a million wannabes who've taught it to a million others. Some of them don't even bother to invent their own patter. If he'd had a copyright on that material and the wherewithal to file suit, Melvin would be a millionaire by now, that is, if you could ever collect from other blockheads. As it is, he's just proud to know he's left his mark on the business. And on any given day, he'd just as well be doing magic anyway (yes, he's invented acts there, too).  On the day Kathleen and I stopped by to see him this year, he told us before we left that we had to watch him do one more card trick. "I think you'll like this one," and he was all self-deprecating in tone, a sure sign from Melvin he's setting you up. True to form, he handed Kathleen the deck, told her to cut the deck anywhere, look at a card, not show it to him, hand it back, let him shuffle, he gave them back... and he never touched them again. And for the next five minutes, Melvin pretty much told her to do whatever she wanted with the deck. Cut them where she wanted. Divide them into a couple piles anywhere she chose. Pick left, right, middle, her choice. And when it was all over, Kathleen having apparently controlled the entire show, Melvin told her to make a final choice between the face-down piles. Any choice at all. She chose. Randomly. Of course she chose her own card, the one she'd picked at the beginning of that little performance. "That," she said, no small amount of awe in her voice, "was really good." "Good?!" Melvin came back, laughing through it, "That was perfect!" And, as always, he was right. (1998) Source

The Anatomical Theatre Exhibition

From Anatomical Theatre Exhibition, September, 2007. University of Alabama at Birmingham.