Founded on February 21^st 1775 by Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine, the Imperiale e Reale Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale in Florence later came to be known simply as La Specola when, in 1789 an astronomical observatory was built onto its top floor. Open to the general public, the establishment housed all the scientific pieces in the Medici collection, which had been donated to the city of Florence by the last of the Medici line, the Electress Anna Maria Luisa, along with the family’s art and properties.

From the moment it opened, La Specola was enormously popular with the public, who came to see its collection of natural history pieces and its famous anatomical wax models which included those made by Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (one of which is on display in this room). By the end of the Eighteenth Century, these alone were responsible for attracting thousands of visitors each year.

The museum also housed the Officina di ceroplastica. Models of the human body were created here directly from life by highly trained wax modellers such as Clemente Susini (1754-1805), Francesco Calenzuoli (1796-1829), Luigi Calamai (1800-1851) ed Egisto Tortori (1829-1893), who imitated elaborate dissections carried out on real bodies. They worked under the supervision of some of the most eminent anatomists of the time, including Felice Fontana (1730 – 1805, who had the idea of creating the workshop in the first place) and Paolo Mascagni (1755-1815). The anatomical models produced in the workshop were in high demand, with commissions from all over Europe. One of the largest orders to be put in at the Officina was that of Emperor Joseph II of Austria, for 1200 pieces, which took the workshop five years to complete and was transported across the Alps to Vienna with mules. Another sizeable order was made by Napoleon after visiting the museum in 1796.

Wax sculptures have been used since antiquity for funerary and devotional purposes, and subsequently in portraiture. The pieces housed in La Specola, on the other hand, fully reflect an Enlightenment perspective of the world – the body-machine, knowledge of nature and replicating it for educational purposes. As the museum’s director, Girolamo dei Bardi, explained in the 1808 annals of the museum, wax sculpture “is the fine art of imitating all manner of anatomical preparations, with the intent of illustrating in detail and as a whole the marvellous human machine and its workings”.

An important nucleus of wax pieces from the Museo della Specola has been arranged in the centre of this room. These works, particularly the large statues of reclining women opened up, are currently the object of a number of historical and philosophical studies, as well as gender debates, by virtue of their undiminished visual power and their ability to inspire those who view them with feelings that range from fascination to unease and even disgust. A new age of interest in wax as a medium is currently underway in contemporary art – along with all those so-called “morphic” materials able to function as a simulacrum of our flesh and encapsulate that which haunts us all from within. (al)