Realities in wax

A comparative anatomical exhibition at the Deutsches Museum Bonn.

Credit: DEUTSCHES MUSEUM BONN

When La Specola museum opened its doors to the Florentine public for the first time in 1775, visitors were confronted with what would have probably been their first view of the inside of the human body. They saw detailed, anatomically correct, wax models of body parts, fed by their networks of blood vessels, supported by bones, and tendons and muscles.

The collection was commissioned in 1771 by Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, over the next decades grew to more than 1, 400 specimens. It was housed, along with other scientific exhibits, in the grand duke's Wunderkammer: public access to the new scientific knowledge was in the spirit of the times and which became known as the Age of Enlightenment.

Returning from Florence in 1786, Goethe reported that “three-dimensional anatomy … has been practised in Florence for many years at a very high level, but it can only flourish where science, arttaste, and technology are integrated in living practice”.

The exhibition at the Deutsches Museum Bonn is part of the 'new' movement to bring together the worlds of art, science. The volume of knowledge is now so vast that the interface between the two is not as self-evident as that which sparked Goethe's words of admiration. But the exhibition nevertheless makes a salient point with its juxtaposition of 30 samples of the Florentine wax models — which have never before been permitted to leave their home town — with modern images of the body as seen from within: two-dimensional X-ray photos (some from 1895), three-dimensional computer magnetic resonance tomography, positron-emission tomography, and angiography and the like.

Those naive eighteenth-century visitors would have been more impressed by their first confrontation with internal anatomy than we, with our overexposed, dulled senses, could ever be by more sophisticated, and theoretically more spectacular, and medical images.

“La Specola: Anatomie in Wachs im Kontrast zu Bildern der modernen Medizin” (Anatomy in Wax in Contrast with Images of Modern Medicine) runs until 19 November 2000