From the very first anatomical atlases compiled in the Sixteenth Century, the artists, sculptors and wax modelers commissioned to represent the anatomical body had to grapple with two crucial and closely related issues. The first was how to reconcile the scientific need for a truthful representation with the inherent artistic drive towards the ideal of beauty. The second, and by no means less thorny issue, was how to deal with the reality of having a human corpse as a subject.

On the first issue, artists had to reconcile themselves with the aesthetic theories of Aristotle, which had held sway for centuries and which made a clear distinction between “portrayal” and “imitation”. Considered to be mere copying (mimesis), imitation qualified as a mechanical action and was therefore not worthy of being considered art. The artist was required to imitate nature not with the idea of duplicating it but in order to idealise or correct it. In their anatomical representations, artists were allowed a degree of freedom to alter the reality before them in order to ennoble it. Hence, we find illustrations of flayed corpses in the dignified poses of classical statues or of celebrated paintings or contextualised within complex allegories of vanitas and memento mori.

The dignified standing figures featured in the anatomical atlases of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries came to be replaced, in the Eighteenth Century, by the emotionally charged, skinned corpses known as écorchés, which exemplified the attitude of the time towards the idea of death – a common trait in anatomical representations of all ages. “The less they convey the idea of memento mori, the more they pose confused and disquieting questions on the nature of life” (P. Ariès). In contemporary medicine books we have therefore witnessed the disturbing coexistence of Eros-Thanatos as a means of reconciling scientific precision with artistic invention in sophisticatedly brutal female dissections (see the plates of Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty and the statues of Giovan Battista Manfredini).

Defined by Aristotelian thought as being quite the opposite of artistic invention in as much as they were mere mechanical copies of nature, both wax portraiture and its direct emanation – anatomical ceroplastics – attracted criticism from both philosophers and art historians. Schopenhauer branded them “misleading imitations” which stunted a work’s elevation from matter to pure form. Aby Warburg defined the clutter of votive dummies in wax – often life-size – hanging from the vaulted ceiling of the SS. Annunziata in Florence (there were 600 of these in the early-Sixteenth Century, near the miraculous image of the Virgin above the high altar) a “vestige of barbarism”. The flourishing Florentine production of votive figurines in wax did however pave the way for the city’s development as a centre for scientific wax models in the Eighteenth Century. Florence in fact produced the earliest anatomical models which were truly faithful to life and, in many cases, of undeniable artistic quality.

Contemporary art has done much to challenge this traditional notion of wax portraiture, and indeed in all those so-called “morphic” mediums which can be modelled onto a real body. Among the properties unique to wax is its ability to “trap” part of a living being within its folds, absorbing its essence and giving life to a kind of “double”. This is not an act of imitation, it is a form of “replacement” of a body or section of it. This particular aspect of wax – its ability to function as both cast and portrait – places it, more than in the tradition of the anatomical model, directly within the realm of what G. Didi-Huberman termed “before the age of art” where wax effigies (imago) were powerful vehicles in magical and healing rituals. This is the case with the practice of anatomical ex-voto effigies, which replaced the diseased portion of a person’s body with a healed section and projected their power into the future, to protect against “unchartered and threatening times” (L. Lombardi Satriani).  

Wax anatomical statues of any period are deeply disturbing to look at. As replica images of the body, they provide a reflection of our life which is unfiltered by metaphor or allegory. They are a disconcerting presence which “oversteps the boundaries of symbolical representation” (E. Gombrich). Eternally suspended between life and death, they confront us with the painfully real experience of the finite nature of our own bodies. (al)