The Face of Death

"In this hall, a bizarre idea came to life: a tomb full of corpses at different stages of putrefaction, from the moment of death till the complete destruction of the individual...The impression created by this masterpiece is so strong that each sense seems to trigger alarm to the others. You bring your hand to your nose as an automatic reaction."

Those are the words of the Marquis de Sade. He does not describe some brutal scene of massacre, nor some sadistic scene in one of his novels, but his impression of the room dedicated to the art of Gaentano Guilio Zumbo at La Specola. Europe's first science museum, La Specola's particular claim to fame was, and is, the largest and most beautiful collection of wax anatomical models in the world. Room after room is filled with dissembled or skinned models, gazing out from their glass cases looking almost, just almost, alive.

In a small side room of the museum are the works of Gaetano Guilio Zumbo (1656-1701). Zumbo's work is one of the earliest uses of wax as a medium for anatomical models. His Anatomy of a Head is the oldest surviving example of a wax sculpture made especially for medical study. However, when compared with the anatomical waxes created by La Specola's other modelers, Zumbo's is a whole different species. The model made by Zumbo is most certainly dead, It is, in fact, in an advanced state of decay. With pallid greenish skin and red ooze coming out of his nose, the anatomy under the skin seems to be visible not because a wax sculptor deemed it so, but because this head is actually rotting. There is a further element of the real in it; the wax is modeled directly onto a human skull.

Wax is the perfect medium with which to convey the gruesome scene; flesh-like by nature, organic in its composition, it looks real; and yet, not quite. The colors a little too vivid, the surface a bit too shiny, the details too perfect. The hyper-realism of it is aesthetically shocking, the subject matter all the more repulsive.

Zumbo's work was not limited to anatomical models. He was also the artist of horrific "Theaters" - wax dioramas with titles like The Plague, The Vanity of Human Glory, and Syphilis. Each one, regardless of its name, depicts death. Piles of green and yellow corpses with gaping holes in them, anguished men lugging their dead, orphaned cherub-babies clinging to their mother's decaying body amidst skulls, bones, and dead animals. Naturally the Marquis de Sade loved them. His own stories were filled with brutality. In fact, he wrote about a horrifying room full of wax models which looked like murdered corpses in 120 Days of Sodom.

Most of today's surviving anatomical waxes were made nearly a century after Zumbo. The bulk of these were created at La Specola. The museum had a wax workshop built right into its basement, and it was there that famous sculptors like Clemente Susini created the beautiful Anatomical Venus's. Her skin is rosy, her hair is long and braided, her eyes half open, lips gently parted. Some wear pearls, others hold their blond braids in their delicate hands. The Anatomical Venus offers a glimpse inside her exquisite body like a beautiful instructional doll. La Specola's anatomical waxes are not quite dead, yet, splayed and gutted, they certainly can't be alive. They occupy a middle place, a sort of suspended animation.

Zumbo's waxes allow no such luxury of disconnect. As if a cadaver on a dissection table, his "Anatomy of a Head" is the decaying face of the viewer's, and one's own inevitable future. No wonder the Marquis loved them.

Link to our Wax Anatomical La Specola Flickr Set.

For more on wax anatomical models, please visit an old post, Anatomical Waxes of the Josephinum, for our account of the second largest collection of medical wax figures in the world.