Читать книгу The Anatomical Venus - Joanna Ebenstein - Страница 23

(25) she was neither the first nor the last of her kind, she was the most accom plished Anatomical Venus ever made, setting the standard by which all other Anatomical Venuses—or reclining anatomized wax women—are today judged. The Medici Venus was born in the workshop of The Museum for Physics and Natural History in Florence, better known as La Specola (after a new observatory was added in 1789). The museum was founded by Leopold II, a revolutionary new leader from Vienna’s Habsburg royal family. He became Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1765, succeeding his father, who had inherited the territory when the last Medici, Gian Gastone, died without an heir, ending three centuries of Medici dynastic rule. The Florence he inherited was far from fig. 8 fig. 9 the centre of wealth and influence the city had been during the Renaissance. Determined to address Tuscany’s decline and what he regarded as the more irra tional practices of the Roman Catholic church, Leopold II set about a programme of social and economic reform based upon his own progressive principles. He abolished corporal punishment, executions, and torture; ended inquisitional courts and prisons; established health care for the poor; and forgave the public debt. In a radical departure from his predecessors, Leopold II believed himself to govern by social contract rather than by divine or sovereign right. Leopold II’s decision to open a public science museum in Florence was a central part of his Enlightenment mission to turn his new subjects into ‘citizens’ by educating them in the empirical observation of natural laws. His new museum would make available to the general public the rare and valuable cul tural artefacts previously secreted in the Medici Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonder. Wunderkammern, the precursors of today’s museums, were private col lections filled with the wonders of the world, both naturalia (natural objects) and artificialia (man-made objects). At this time, and up until the nineteenth century, science as we now understand it did not yet exist; the study of the natural world was largely the province of natural philosophy, which incorporated a variety of fig. 8 Detail of an eighteenth-century portrait of the popular and learned ‘Enlightenment Pope’, Pope Benedict XIV (1675–1758). fig. 9 Detail of a portrait of Leopold II (1747–92), Grand Duke of Tuscany, after he became Holy Roman Emperor in 1790. AV_00966_pre-pdf layout_001_215.indd 25 12/01/2016 12:14 THE BIRTH OF THE anaTOmIcal VEnUS[1]