Incorruptible

The first of Clemente Susini’s Anatomical Venuses was created 1780-82. Known as the Medici Venus, it is a life-sized wax figure of a supine woman whose torso can be lifted and the organs taken out. A great number of these models were produced in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to teach medical students dissection without the problem of corpses rotting in the Tuscan heat. They all share a disturbing, erotic vulnerability; with their heads tilted back and their lips parted, it is impossible to tell whether they are experiencing pain or ecstasy. The production of these hyper-sexualised models has baffled anatomists and art historians for centuries. I wanted to ask the question: under what circumstances could a woman have made these models?

​

My project comprises an historical novel and a commentary through which I explore twenty-first-century reactions to these eighteenth-century wax anatomical models. The novel tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cosima, a fictional character placed within the real wax anatomical workshop at La Specola in eighteenth-century Florence. Her colleague, Clemente Susini, has just produced the first female anatomical model, the Medici Venus, but, despite its popularity in the exhibition, Cosima thinks they can do better. Against the orders of the museum’s director, Cosima and Susini dissect in secret, their aim being to produce a female model as scientifically accurate as its male counterparts.