Clemente Susini: Venerina (1782)
Anatomically accurate in every detail and vividly displaying the internal organs, this and other disemboweled beauties were primarily used for teaching purposes at a special workshop within the Natural History Museum, Florence (La Specola). But they were also put on public display for those whose intellectual curiosity terminated in thanatological voyeurism.
Feminist commentators, keen to read these figures in terms of sexual objectification and what we might term necropygmalionism, find something profoundly unsettling about them. Indeed, for Zoe Williams:
"There seems to be something blasphemous, inhumane, in creating a corpse and trying to beautify it - or rather, in considering beauty to be a necessary trait in an anatomically accurate dead body. In taking beauty to be such a critical component of womanhood, it misses, and seals in wax its own misapprehension of, what beauty is."
But one might suggest that it's Ms Williams who, in this case, misunderstands; not what beauty is, but what its function is and why we need to lend to even the most revolting of all things - death, not womanhood - an element of aesthetic delight.
The unfortunate fact is, corpses don't look great: "Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch's The Scream. The colour drains from their faces" - and no one wants to see that; not even in wax replica.
As Nietzsche wrote: We need art so that we don't perish from the truth ...
See: Zoe Williams, 'Cadavers in pearls: meet the Anatomical Venus', The Guardian, 17 May, 2016 - click here.
Note: the description of the corpse and its horrific nature is by Caitlin Doughty; Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016), p. 116.
Those interested in knowing more about this topic might care to read Joanna Ebenstein's beautifully illustrated book, The Anatomical Venus, (Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2016).
