All You Need Is Morbid

Anatomical Venus

Anatomical Venus

“The images we humans make of ourselves are like mirrors.

What we see in them depends on who we are.”

—from the entry text to the San Francisco Exploratorium’s

Revealing Bodies exhibit, March-September 2000

Her toes curved delicately. No creases lined her feet. One heel was attached to the opposite ankle as her feet rested on a mauve silk handkerchief with golden fringe.

Her torso gaped open from pubis to collarbone. Inside the cavity, her fallopian tubes lay deflated across scraps of intestine. Her uterus was larger than my fist — maybe as big as both fists put together. I wondered if she was pregnant.

Her heart, laid open, revealed its chambers. The main vein and artery were big enough to insert my fingers, as I’d seen done in a cadaver lab. A segment of lung draped her liver, which had escaped dissection. Her huge kidneys lay much higher in her body than I expected.

The glossiness of the organs disturbed me less than the sheen of her limbs. No hairs or muscles defined them. Even though she’d taught medicine for more than two hundred years, she remained smooth and perfectly feminine.

Her pink lips parted to hint at teeth. She had a long, straight Italian nose. The faintest blush colored her cheeks. Her feathery eyelashes were real hair, individually inset by hand. The braid trailing across her left arm looked very dark in contrast. The rest of her locks had faded unevenly, almost blond in places.

Her half-closed eyes looked dusty, definitely glazed and dead. Perhaps it was easier to examine her like this, unconscious or dead, rather than alert and aware.

The Exploratorium’s Revealing Bodies exhibited 150 artifacts, artworks, and interactive objects, including a wax model of a syphilitic tongue from Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, sections of plastinated humans (on huge leaves, so you could page through them), and many more treasures. The centerpiece of the investigation of the cross-pollination between art and medicine, a seven-layer Medical Venus had been cast in wax from an estimated 200 dissections. She’d never before traveled out of Italy.

I fell in love with the Venus, lying like Snow White in her glass coffin. I bought a membership to the museum just so I could visit her again.

During the exhibition’s six-month run, the Exploratorium pioneered live web casts. Revealing Bodies’ curator Melissa Alexander hosted a live tour of the Venus’s home museum in Florence, Italy — Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Universita di Firenze Sezione di Zoologia, known as ‘La Specola’ — the oldest public science museum in Europe. I gaped in awe of the place.

Late in the eighteenth century, Pietro Leopoldo di Lorena, Grand Duke of Tuscany, decided to build a museum of natural history in Florence to showcase items collected by generations of Medici. After gathering a variety of new specimens, including taxidermied animals, the museum opened in 1771. Four years later, the Grand Duke opened the museum to the general public.

Originally, the Grand Duke did not favor dissecting cadavers. After he viewed the exquisite craftsmanship of Clement Susini, the most brilliant sculptor in wax of the time, Duke Pietro Leopoldo consented to dissection if it created anatomical models for teaching medicine. The Duke financed a laboratory next to the museum expressly for the purpose of sculpting the waxes. With help from Giuseppe Fernini, Susini created my Venus. Felice Fontana, the museum’s first director, pioneered teaching anatomy without dissection.