Читать книгу The Anatomical Venus - Joanna Ebenstein - Страница 33

(36) in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy, were made late in life by Clemente Susini, without Felice Fontana’s supervision. Fontana notoriously gave his artists very little freedom, and the Cagliari waxes are considered among Susini’s finest works. The virtuosity of Susini’s Medici Venus called not only upon the conventions offine art, but also upon a considerable tradition of dissectible female figures. Anatomical illustrations had often taken the form of ‘fugitive sheets’—in which paper flaps could be pulled back or moved to reveal the structures beneath— as well as static, cutaway views in which internal organs were made visible to simulate an imaginary dissection. The Medici Venus also evoked religious prec edents, most notably statues of the Mater gravida or ‘our lady of expectations’—in which a pregnant Mary was shown with the baby Jesus visible inside the womb preVious An interior view at La Specola showing three Anatomical Venuses surrounded by smaller waxes and illustrations of anatomical details. fig. 17 fig. 18 fig. 19 fig. 17 Seventeenth century engraving of the anatomical theatre, University of Padua, built in 1594. fig. 18 A public dissection in Padua’s anatomical theatre. Frontispiece from Johann Vesling’s Syntagma Anatomicum (1647). through a door or cutaway. Also significant is a wooden, demountable, pregnant anatomical Eve from the seventeenth century, whose internal organs and fetus come into view when her breastplate is removed, her genitals discreetly hidden by a wreath of carved leaves. Felice Fontana eventually came to believe that wood was a better medium than wax for creating anatomical teaching models, as it was less fragile and the students could demount and reassemble the model, thus intuitively learning the relationship between the internal structures. He spent the last years of his life working on a prototype anatomical male model of painted wood, dissectible into 3,000 pieces. Due to fluctuations in humidity that changed the size of the pieces, it was never realized. The most common precursors of the Medici Venus were smaller dissectible female figures (or, less often, male figures) crafted of ivory, wood, and other media, known as ‘anatomical manikins’ (see also pages 52–53). The majority of manikins were crafted in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each model is about the size of a hand and reclines on its own little bed, often on a pillow of cloth or ivory. Their organs, though dissectible, lack detail and AV_00966_pre-pdf layout_001_215.indd 36 12/01/2016 12:14 chapter one[1]