The Re-Birth of Venus in Florence's Royal Museum of Physics And
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Journal of the History of Collections Advance Access published May 16, 2012 Journal of the History of Collections (2012) pp. 1–21 The Re-Birth of Venus in Florence’s Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History Rebecca Messbarger For a number of years after the inauguration of Peter Leopold’s Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History in Florence in 1775, the most powerful magnet at the heart of the collection became the newly exhibited Anatomical Venus, capable of disassembly and recomposition. This article examines the explicit scientific and artistic significance of the Venus within the context of the Royal Museum and, more broadly, how this idealized three-dimensional image of the anatomized female body served Peter Leopold’s mission of popular Enlightenment. A novel instrument of science, an unexpected physics machine, the Downloaded from deconstructable Venus allowed the expert as well as the amateur and even the unschooled virtually to do human dissection themselves and thereby represented a potent challenge to the iconic Venuses of the past regime. My analysis centres on the overt connections and competition of the waxen Venus with classical and Renaissance icons of Medici dynastic reign, just across the Arno in the Uffizi. http://jhc.oxfordjournals.org/ SEVERAL years after the opening in 1775 of the progressively by discrete strata the systems and organs Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History in of the body. Although obviously an immaculate con- Florence,1 the Museum’s chief artist Giuseppe Ferrini ception of anatomical dismembering, cleansed of any and his assistant Clemente Susini created from an vestiges of blood, death and decay, the Venus never- array of plaster moulds and great quantities of molten theless evoked the female anatomy specimen in the wax a graphic full-scale figure they christened the iconic dissection scene on the title-page of Andreas anatomical Venus.2 Conjured by classically trained Vesalius’s commanding Fabrica (1543) (Fig. 2). As by guest on June 6, 2012 sculptor’s hands rather than the foamy mingling of Katharine Park has observed, the female cadaver in Uranus’s severed testicles with the living sea, the artful the engraving ‘emphasized the distance between the incarnation of the goddess of beauty, fecundity and (male) anatomist and his (female) object’ and served desire instantly became the most powerful magnet to establish the author as the new empirical anatomist, and featured attraction at the centre of the Museum’s who, with his own hands methodically disclosed and vast anatomical collection. Indeed, among Grand classified her strange and secret entrails, redolent Tourists and ordinary tourists the Venus upstaged symbols of the veiled truths of the human body and of the thousands of natural and mechanical objects on Nature herself.3 Divested of the Vesalian cadaver’s display in room after room of the Torrigiani Palace. crude jumble of burbling viscera as well as of the The idealized female figure evocatively positioned in greedy swarm of male spectators pressing upon the a state of passionate abandon on a silken bed uniquely dissection table for a closer view, the waxen Venus demonstrated the anatomy of the torso, from the sur- would nevertheless seem to occupy the same subal- face musculature just beneath the skin to the glands tern position beneath the master anatomist’s probing of the breast, the organs of the thoracic cavity and scalpel and the spectators’ excited gaze. the remote organs of the lower abdomen, including a gravid uterus with miniature foetus, through parts that could be systematically dismantled and held in Recontextualizing the hand (Fig. 1). More than two centuries years had, of course, passed This layered, palpable presentation of the female since Vesalius had revolutionized anatomical science anatomy alluded, of course, to the experience of an by tossing aside the approved Galenic script, stepping actual dissection in which the anatomist uncovers down from the lector’s throne and boldly taking © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/jhc/fhs007 REBECCA MESSBARGER Downloaded from Fig. 1. Anatomical Venus, wax. Courtesy of the Museum of Natural History in Florence. Photo credit: Saulo Bambi. and the precision tools and technology of the science http://jhc.oxfordjournals.org/ far more numerous and refined, from scalpels to microscopes, injecting instruments and, indeed, virtual anatomical specimens that surpassed in critical ways the didactic utility of decomposing cadavers. While the Fabrica continued to be a chief iconographic prototype for anatomy studies and illustration during the eighteenth century, the Florentine anatomical Venus was, in fact, a very different sign of science and anatom- by guest on June 6, 2012 ical truth from Vesalius’s title-page cadaver. It was the product of new scientific technology, greater ana- tomical knowledge and refined practices, a far more expansive and speedy circulation of texts and ideas, and it was, crucially, directed at a new public. The Venus served the edification and delight of the mixed citizenry of the Tuscan Grand Duchy and indeed the wider world. It was intended to be viewed, just as Il Caffè, the premier Italian Enlightenment Fig. 2. Andreas Vesalius, detail of title-page of De humani corporis journal, was intended to be read, likewise ‘by the fabrica, 1543. Courtesy of Bernard Becker Medical Library, grave magistrate and the vivacious maiden; by callous, Washington University School of Medicine, Saint Louis. conservative intellectuals and tender, young minds.’4 The context and site where the new Venus underwent centre stage in the anatomy theatre to perform the its repeated, pristine dissections was, quite simply, no visceral drama of anatomical truth-finding himself. longer the restricted Renaissance anatomy theatre The quarrel of the ancients and the moderns over but the public science museum of a self-consciously experimental anatomy was by this point in the last enlightened nation-state.5 Compared to the sixteenth- quarter of the eighteenth century long settled and century public anatomy in such cities as Bologna and Vesalius’s own authority increasingly overshadowed Padua, where select members of the university and by more knowing and meticulous masters. By 1775, ecclesiastical ranks gathered to view a series of dissec- experimental anatomy was the unquestioned norm, tions during two brief weeks at Carnival, from 1783 to 2 THE RE- BIRTH OF VENUS IN FLORENCE’ S ROYAL MUSEUM OF PHYSICS AND NATURAL HISTORY 1788, for which numbers have been tallied, Florence’s and the natural order. As General Luigi Ferdinando Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History opened Marsili, founder sixty years prior, in 1714, of Bologna’s its doors annually to 6,000 to 22,000 visitors of every premier Institute of Sciences had aspired, the modern origin and rank.6 philosopher would become a ‘naturalista metodico’ or The difference hinges on a shift from a scientific methodical natural philosopher, engaged in research culture whose prime object was ‘possessing nature’, to and teaching in accordance with the tripartite method borrow from Paula Findlen’s aptly titled book on Italian of ‘exposition, classification, and experiment’ for the Renaissance museums and collecting, to an increas- benefit of all who wished to learn (native and foreign) ingly integrated political and scientific culture during and for the general public welfare.8 Within the sphere the Italian Enlightenment aimed at the broad dissemin- of the Enlightenment science museum, Nature in its ation of scientific knowledge. Renaissance philosophers infinitely various manifestations becomes, at least took ownership of nature, in literal terms, through col- ostensibly, the intellectual birthright of every person. lecting and taxonomy, uncovering and dissection – the In her defence of women’s education published in accumulation and mostly private display of natural 1774, one year before the opening of the Royal exempla and the prescribed classification based on Museum in Florence, the female mathematician and Downloaded from antique texts of these artefacts in words as well as poet Diamante Medaglia Faini lyrically mapped the images. The collector’s acquisition of natural objects vast province of natural philosophy not only for and their exhibition, whether in his private cabinet or academic élites but also for women, who, of course, studiolo, home laboratory, or even the university hall signified everyone else: or anatomy theatre, exhibited in clear and quantifiable It penetrates the recesses of the earth and scrutinizes the http://jhc.oxfordjournals.org/ terms to an élite academic brotherhood the scope of marvellous processes that take place therein. It ascends to his knowledge and degree of his cultural prestige. In the heavens and seeks to know the movements of the stars summarizing the cultural and social ideology of the and to observe the order and the regularity that reign there. archetypal early Renaissance museum, Eileen Hooper It contemplates the waters and all the creatures that wriggle within them. And it explains marvellously the prodigious Greenhill turns to the practices of collecting of the phenomena that occur there.9 Medici princes: With telescopes and microscopes, barometers, air and The studiolo of Francesco I (1541-87) was an attempt to hydraulic pumps, electrical machines and pendulums, by guest on June 6, 2012 gather together artifacts that represented the order of the world, to constitute a secret site in and from which the as well as vast exhibits of insects, stuffed birds and prince could position himself symbolically as ruler of the animals from every corner of the globe, and indeed, world. It further operated as a microcosm of art and nature, real and wax botanical and anatomical specimens, the articulating their relationships to the elements, the humours public science museum was the ideal venue for an and the seasons as presented in mythology, literature, his- eclectic public to encounter the cosmic order and to tory and contemporary technology.