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Women, wax and anatomy in the ‘century of things’
Author(s) -
Dacome Lucia
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
renaissance studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1477-4658
pISSN - 0269-1213
DOI - 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2007.00461.x
Subject(s) - wax , context (archaeology) , meaning (existential) , art , natural (archaeology) , art history , literature , history , philosophy , biology , epistemology , archaeology , biochemistry
In eighteenth‐century Italy, anatomical waxworks were considered particularly apt to represent the human body. Life‐size, coloured, three‐dimensional and soft and moist‐looking, they could offer compelling replicas of the living body. This essay explores the significance of material properties of wax, such as softness and malleability, in the fashioning of anatomical wax‐modelling as a reliable source of medical knowledge. It does so by focusing on the case of two eighteenth‐century Bolognese women, the anatomist Anna Morandi Manzolini and the holy woman Laura Chiarini, who became famous as skilled wax‐modellers. Attention is drawn to the gendering of wax‐modelling as an activity that resonated with long‐standing views linking generation with the impression of soft matter. The shifting meaning of wax in the context of the fluid boundaries of early modern domains of the natural, preternatural and supernatural is also considered in the light of Morandi's and Chiarini's different practices of wax‐modelling. (pp. 522–550)