Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rebecca Messbarger is associate professor in romance languages at Washington University in St. Louis and coeditor and cotranslator of The Contest for Knowledge: Debates over Women's Learning in Eighteenth-Century Italy, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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The Lady Anatomist

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................................................................ixAcknowledgments...............................................................................xiIntroduction: Changing the Angle of Vision....................................................11 · The Pope's Anatomy Museum............................................................202 · Professing Anatomy...................................................................523 · Re-casting...........................................................................734 · The Lady Anatomist...................................................................995 · Esse est Percipi: Hands and Eyes.....................................................1196 · Beneath the Fig Leaf: The Male Reproductive System and Genitalia.....................1357 · Cessio ac Venditio: The Final Years and the End of an Age............................163Notes.........................................................................................177Bibliography..................................................................................213Index.........................................................................................229

Chapter One

    If in perfection tempered were the wax,
    And were the heaven in its supremest virtue,
    The brilliance of the seal would all appear;

    But nature gives it evermore deficient,
    In the like manner working as the artist,
    Who has the skill of art and hand that trembles.

      DANTE, Paradise, canto 13

    A man, young lady! Lady, such a man
    As all the world—why, he's a man of wax.

      SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet, 1.3.75–76

At the confluence of two rivers of ambition, Bologna in the eighteenth century was uniquely suited to become the European center for modeling the anatomized human body in wax. Archbishop Prospero Lambertini's resolve to advance his native city's reputation as a premier site of science, and the Bolognese artist Ercole Lelli's (1702–1766) mastery of anatomical sculpture and fierce hunger for a leading role in Bologna's cultural revival coalesced to elevate anatomical wax sculpture to a spectacular sign of the new Bologna (figs. 9–10). The Bolognese nobleman and future Pope Benedict XIV blessed with his enduring favor and financing the artist Lelli, whose wax anatomies would ally art, science, and religion through a novel integration of a practical didactics of the body with a spectacular and solemn aesthetics. A dramatic emblem of the communion between faith and the new science espoused by the Enlightenment pope, the Anatomy Museum that he would establish within the Institute of Sciences simultaneously evoked sacred and scientific spaces and aims. It conjured church and Public Anatomy theater, reliquary and natural history cabinet in its graphic and moralizing display of the anatomized body.

Ercole Lelli's anatomical wax figures mingled a neoclassical heroism and a "dust to dust" morality with the scalpel's precision. He proffered through his anatomical sculptures a rebalancing of the retributive ethic and spectacular aesthetic of the baroque memento mori with empirical scientific practice. Quite simply, his anatomically precise, pathos-laden anatomical figures epitomized the hybrid drama of sin and science played out annually at the university's renowned Public Anatomy, or Carnival Dissection, as it was known. Placed by the pope in the prestigious Institute of Sciences at the intersection between the Academy of Science and the Clementina Academy of Art, Lelli's series of life-size anatomical figures served to dramatize Bologna's historic and renewed distinction in anatomical science while at the same time exemplifying for Bolognese artists a more exacting standard of anatomical design. The waxworks specifically demonstrated the anatomical apparatuses of muscle and bone that move the body, those parts most important to painters and sculptors. On a practical level, with Lambertini's prominent backing, the anatomical waxes represented a specialized new art form. But they did not in fact serve the practical science of anatomy itself.

The Anatomy Museum was above all an ideal means for riveting international attention on La Dotta, Bologna's lofty ancient moniker meaning "The Learned," that Lambertini clearly favored over the more familiar body-bound epithet La Grassa—"The Fat." By placing on permanent display a graphic exhibition of the skinned and sected body that Bologna's famed Carnival Dissection could only stage for enthralled visitors during two short weeks in the coldest season of the year, the museum was just the magnet to attract the fascination and awe of Grand Tourists, Enlightenment republicans, and the Bolognese themselves. Fulfilling, then, on a continual basis the essential civic function that Giovanna Ferrari has incisively termed "utilia spectacula" of the transitory Carnival Dissection, the Anatomy Museum would perform enduringly for an eclectic public the layered and morally poignant drama of human dissection, mortality, and God's holy handiwork in the smallest of the body's covert parts. As Lucia Dacome has observed, an essential semiotic continuity thus allied the museum and the civic ceremony in the aims of their exhibition of the anatomized body.

In stark contrast, Anna Morandi's near-contemporaneous wax anatomies encompassed not only the body's locomotor apparatus but all anatomical systems and parts, including microscopic components, and were conceived explicitly as didactic tools for medical practitioners and connoisseurs of anatomical science. Devoid of moral overtone and any vestiges of the mystical, her "reasoned images" resulted from what she and her husband had perceived directly during countless human dissections in their home laboratory. Morandi's anatomical models functioned as ideal substitutes for imperfect nature—individual, decaying human bodies—guiding not the artist's but the scientist's eyes and hands in anatomical discovery and knowledge of the interconnected structure and function of the body's parts. Like Lelli, she created a decorous vision of the body in wax—vigorous, proportioned, youthful, emblematic—but one in which the ideal rendering aimed to augment, not distract from by moral implication, the practical knowledge of fascia, organs, vessels, and bones. Her eschewal in her waxworks of the symbolism and moral connotations of the traditional anatomical dissection scene was at variance with Bologna's cultural mainstream. She was, therefore, the "other" anatomical wax modeler of Bologna. Her too useful wax anatomies disqualified her ranking among either the artists or the professor-anatomists of Bologna and cast her instead among the artificers, the minions of art and science.

As a woman anatomist, Morandi also defied gender roles conventional to Bologna's famed public anatomical dissection performed annually in the Archiginnasio Anatomy Theater. In this and all ancient to early modern anatomies, Woman, when present, was perpetually typecast as the literal femme fatale, the cadaver opened and probed by the male professor-anatomist. As a teacher of anatomy in her home laboratory-school and anatomical modeling studio, Morandi boldly reversed these set roles; much more will be said about this in subsequent chapters. In Lambertini's new Bologna, however, one exceptional, learned woman won a leading part in the Public Anatomy. From 1734, two years after she became the first woman in Bologna to receive a university degree, until her death near the end of the century, the natural philosopher Laura Bassi gave requisite orations on an anatomical subject during the course of the public dissection. Lambertini and other municipal leaders vigorously promoted Bassi as a symbol of the city's cultural resurgence and designated her part in the Archiginnasio's famous serial drama to heighten both its prestige and its intrigue and thereby the celebrity of the city. Within her home laboratory where, without the benefit and concomitant obligations of state sponsorship, she instructed medical students and connoisseurs by means of her dispassionate waxworks, Morandi contested these stock roles assigned to women even as she challenged the artistic and moralizing overtones of Bologna's Public Anatomy lessons.

To better understand Morandi's peripheral cultural role and the unorthodoxy of her verisimilar anatomical wax models, we must look more closely at sanctioned visions of the body and femininity in Bologna's principal dissection scenes, real and virtual. The remainder of this chapter thus leaves the main story of Anna Morandi to explore the history, the ritualized aesthetic, and the symbolism of the University of Bologna's Public Anatomy and its analogue in vibrant waxworks displayed in the pope's Anatomy Museum.

Commedia della Morte

As winter's grip tightened in early January around La Grassa's rapacious gorge, a two-week suspension of the liturgical calendar freed her to bid a final, zealous Carne Vale! or Farewell to Meat! until the Easter thaw. Raucous festivities, permissive masquerades, and all varieties of bodily indulgence upturned rigid social codes in anticipation of Lenten penitence and deprivations. It was at this time that the performance of the annual Public Anatomy, otherwise known as Carnival Dissection—a very different kind of farewell to meat—took place in choreographed stages during the fifteen days before Ash Wednesday.

A series of official acts traditionally anticipated the Public Anatomy. The capital execution of a local criminal was an elaborate public ritual that served as prologue to his dissection, which commonly occurred after sunset on the same day. In his redolent analysis of what he calls the "liturgy of public executions," Lionello Puppi unravels the intricate regulations and the moral and political logic of "the highest, most difficult example of an ars moriendi, and the most edifying." As Puppi has described, in the days leading up to the event, printed manifests blanketed the city's walls, announcing the hour and place of the execution. The state would typically effect absolute justice in the central Piazza Maggiore, where citizens would gather on the appointed day at the summons of a cacophony of church bells to witness the torment and death of the villain and, it was hoped, thereby quell any wickedness lurking in their own hearts (fig. 11). The mob, often festooned in carnival masks and electrified by anxious expectancy, would pack into the grand piazza and jostle for position. Clad in their white cloaks prominently marked with a black skull and cross, the religious Morte Confraternity led the condemned through the city streets to the site of the execution. Notably, Archbishop Prospero Lambertini was himself a member of the confraternity and, despite his high position, conducted criminals to the top of the scaffold, prayed with them for God's mercy, and remained as a comfort until their death. Even when capital criminals inconvenienced the state by avoiding prosecution during Carnival, the unclaimed corpses of the indigent that would then serve for the Public Anatomy were seen to exude a similar odor of iniquity as those whose crimes officially warranted the final postmortem humiliation of dissection.

An affiliated protocol and ceremonial rules also governed the discharge of the Public Anatomy, with their procedures set in motion several weeks before the actual dissection of the criminal's corpse. According to eighteenth-century rules governing the "Ceremony of the Anatomy Lesson,"

In the first days of January, the University Prior customarily contacts the Anatomist at which time the Anatomist as a rule asks him when he would command the commencement of the Anatomy. With decorum they then reach a cordial agreement on the day. The day set ... the most illustrious and excellent Deacon informs the most illustrious and excellent Administrators of the University such that the Anatomist and Surgeon are called to the Public Palace and are assigned the [Public Anatomy].... The Anatomist then invites the most eminent Cardinal Legate to the first lesson ... [along with] the Vice Legate ... the Gonfaloniere and ... the Prior of the Anziani ... the University Prior ... and the most illustrious and reverend Archdeacon. Finally, it is customary to invite the most eminent Signor Cardinal Archbishop.

Indeed, Archbishop Lambertini was a regular witness to the opening lesson that occurred, as Giovanna Ferrari has brilliantly described, in the smoke and shimmer of candlelight reflecting off iridescent satin panels that swathed the walls of the second-floor anatomy theater in the Archiginnasio. With him, robed civic and religious authorities and university professors took their assigned seats. The prior, cardinal legate, vice legate, archbishop, and professor-anatomist each had his own carved armchair (fig. 12). Musical accompaniment set a somber mood but offered slight distraction from the bone-penetrating chill in the room. Once the high-ranking officials were installed, university students quickly clambered into the available seating scattered among the three rows of tiered benches that ascended all four walls. Finally, space allowing, common citizens and foreign visitors could purchase a ticket for the remaining seats or for standing room in the back. From behind their carnival masks, these often unruly and vociferous spectators dared prolonged looks at the cadaver laid out on the marble dissection table. Its parts, now bleached and glistening, now wrapped in gloom from the oscillating torchlight at the head and foot of the table, were protected from the hands of the overly curious by a wooden balustrade.

Each of the fourteen days of the Public Anatomy offered its own publicized disputation in Latin. The spectacle was, therefore, multiform. The carving of the cadaver by prosectors and surgeons that at once incited intellectual curiosity, fear, and rowdy taunts from the Carnival masques competed with the often near-riotous scholarly quarrel. For almost half the eighteenth century, a third spectacle was an added draw for visitors to Bologna's anatomy theater. From 1734 until the year of her death in 1778, Laura Bassi was obligated to showcase her uncommon learning as a regular disputant at the Public Anatomy. The refined female figure in hoopskirt and fur stole struck an artful contrast to the drama of the naked and dismembered cadaver at her side. Her role in the dissection scene will be discussed at greater length later in this chapter.

A number of historians have elucidated the symbolic function of the Public Anatomy as social and sacred ritual. Andrew Cunningham has sardonically likened it to a foxhunt, because essentially "it is about blood, death, and pleasure," the blood and death of the sinner-criminal and the ritualized pleasure of witnessing his public execution and dissection, which restored the body politic to its very marrow. Far apart from the needs of medicine and anatomy students, which were, in fact, little served by the public dissection, it at once reinforced traditional social hierarchies and belief systems and, as important, excited intense foreign interest, which in turn fueled municipal pride. According to Bolognese civic leaders themselves, the Public Anatomy satisfied "the interests of the splendor, the decoration and the honorific needs of the University and the whole city." Copious municipal documents recount the vigorous mid-century drive to restore the now-diminished Public Anatomy to its past glory, as "singular and unique in Italy, if not the whole world." A distinctly subordinate concern among civic leaders was the instruction of medical students, who had far better venues for their training in human dissection, namely the anatomical and surgical laboratories of designated hospitals and the household studios of their professors, where yearlong courses in practical anatomy were held. Spectacle thus clearly subsumed science in this dramatic exhibition.

The art historian William Heckscher has argued compellingly that the Public Anatomy should be read as the central act of a three-act morality play coproduced by church and state. Fixed characters, from criminal to executioner, cardinal legate to anatomist, acted out a set plot before a designated public of the powerful and, at times, popular classes. Performed in the first act was the capital execution of a criminal in the public square. The public dissection that comprised the second act meted out a contrappasso punishment against the body of the criminal, who had violated the body politic. The celebratory banquet of surgeons and civic leaders at the fulfillment of the penalty and the Christian burial of the criminal marked the restoration of social order and constituted the drama's denouement. It was theater, however, with potent mystical consequences.

Through the ritualized public execution of the criminal body and its desecration by means of dissection, a conversion—indeed, a transubstantiation—potentially took place of a doomed into a saved soul, a sinner into a saint. In his exquisite documentation and analysis of the case of the young Bolognese maidservant Lucia Cremonini, who was hanged in 1710 in the Piazza Maggiore for the crime of infanticide, Adriano Prosperi gives breath and pulse to the theory that the capital execution could, in the ideal, become a martyrdom reconciling both the criminal and the witnesses to her death into God's grace. Prosperi writes:

An extraordinary metamorphosis: Lucia, with eyes fixed on the votive tablet (that is, on the image of the crucified Christ held by her Consoler), making her way to the gallows to offer there an example of Christian death, is no longer the condemned and abhorred infanticide. She is a courageous woman who makes a display of her repentant self and accepts her own death. She does so in such a deeply convincing way as to appear in the eyes of her brother Consolers a saint going to martyrdom, joined to the community of believers by common prayers and ready to face her journey toward Paradise.

The dissection of the criminal body that followed a capital hanging (though not, it seems, in Lucia's case) extended the punishment beyond death and, it was hoped, the possibility for grace among the contrite. As Katharine Park has observed, "like the body of Christ, who died like a criminal, mutilated on the cross, or like the scattered bones of long-dead martyrs," the broken and offended corpse of the anatomized criminal was a potential "conduit for divine grace."

The Public Anatomy therefore served the twin functions, both fundamentally symbolic, of disciplining nature and fallen human nature. It was a conquest of the secrets of the body through dissection, and of the sinful soul through the redemptive retribution of suffering, death, and the defilement of the sinner's bodily remains. The Anatomy Museum that Pope Benedict XIV would establish would artfully integrate, indeed virtually incorporate in colored wax, the spectacle, the symbolism, and the science of Bologna's Carnival Dissection.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Lady Anatomistby Rebecca Messbarger Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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