VENUS IN THE ARCHIVE

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Acknowledgements

Research for this article was made possible by funding from the British Academy and the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Notes

1. An account of the history of the Spitzner collection and its exhibition can be found in Hoffmann (2006).

2. The ‘Sleeping Venus’, exhibited in a recumbent position in a glass case, included a breathing apparatus ‘designed to give the illusion of life through a mechanical movement that lent the model the illusion of living breath’ (Hoffmann 2006, 141).

3. The collection was discovered in a storage facility in the late 1970s, before being offered for sale in the mid-1980s. Much of Spitzner's collection (including the Venus in Figure 1) was bought by a public institution, the Musée Delmas-Orfila-Rouvière (run by the University of Paris's Anatomy Department), which has also recently closed. Spitzner's Venus is now in permanent storage.

4. One reason for this is that many of these pieces were destroyed during a crackdown on popular anatomy museums by vice squads in the mid- to late nineteenth century (Sappol 2002).

5. Prior to 1745, when surgeons were still part of the same guild as barbers, anatomical dissection played a relatively minor role in Western medical practice. Dissection was believed to defile the physical integrity of the body, and was accordingly restricted to the bodies of the destitute and executed criminals. After the infamous Burke and O'Hare case in 1828, during which Burke was convicted of murdering 15 indigents and selling his victims’ bodies to the Edinburgh Medical College, collective popular disapproval culminated in a series of public demonstrations against the College of Surgeons. At this time, anatomy was publicly viewed as both an extension of the penal system and itself a practice of borderline legality. In the popular imagination, anatomists often ‘seemed to be monsters … Their dealings with the dead—purchasing, grave-robbing and the like—caused public outrage and rioting against anatomy schools’ (MacDonald 2005, 30). Indeed, the practice of anatomy was so disreputable that the medical journal The Lancet fulminated in an editorial: ‘It's disgusting to talk of anatomy as a science, whilst it is cultivated by means of practices which would disgrace a nation of cannibals’ (quoted in Richardson 2001, 131).

6. One reason for this shortage was that, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pregnant women condemned to public execution—and whose bodies were thus available for dissection—could ‘plead their bellies’ and be granted a stay of execution until after the birth of their child. In practice, such women were often pardoned after the birth (Richardson 2001).

7. Unlike the models made to demonstrate ‘standard anatomy’, the great majority of Venuses are not écorché figures: that is, figures from which the epidermis has been removed to show the musculature or skeletal system. The skin of most Venuses is otherwise intact, and only the reproductive anatomy shown.

8. Desnoües learned anatomical modelling from Gaetano Giulo Zumbo (1656–1701), whose Anatomical Head (still on display in La Specola) is thought to be the oldest surviving example of an anatomical waxwork made especially for medical study (de Ceglia 2005, 2).

9. While the Wellcome Museum does have an earlier anatomical Venus, dating from the seventeenth century, it is made of wood (rather than wax, as the eighteenth-century models were) and is much cruder in execution and anatomical detail. I have not come across any documents suggesting this figure was exhibited to the general public in the seventeenth century, nor detailing how widely artificial anatomy was used as teaching models during this time.

10. Didi-Huberman (1999) positions anatomical Venuses as the ultimate expression of a tradition that includes the Venus de Milo, Botticelli's ‘Birth of Venus’ and Venus of Urbino as some of its better known examples.

11. The relationship between dissection and artificial anatomical modelling could be quite material, however: Zumbo's Anatomical Head is moulded around an actual skull, as a recent X-ray demonstrated.

12. Chovet subsequently moved to Philadelphia in 1774, where he taught for more than a decade at the College of Philadelphia (now University of Pennsylvania) (Miller 1911; Schnalke 1995).

13. Chovet appears to have relocated an extensive collection with him to Philadelphia, which was bought after his death by the Pennsylvania Hospital. In 1888, the entire collection was destroyed by fire. I have been unable to track whether a Venus was included in the collection at the time of its purchase or demise.

14. Despite this caveat, it is worth recognising that the anatomical knowledge on display in Chovet's Venus was made possible nonetheless through an actual dissection. Moreover, his model is represented being subjected to a practice much more ‘barbaric and cruel’ than dissection itself, which is practised on corpses: Chovet's Venus spectacularly depicts its subject dissected while still alive.

15. Venuses clearly remained popular: the 1784 catalogue for Rackstrow's lists 10 Venuses amongst its 117 exhibits. The first two of these are, from their descriptions, those of Chovet and Desnoües.

16. The pamphlet cites the Birmingham Advertiser, that ‘[h]aving twice paid a visit to the Florentine Venus, our curiosity was not so great as it otherwise would have been, and it was not till yesterday we paid a visit to this wonder of art’ (1844, iii). The two Venuses also seem to have been very similar in style and execution, with the notable exception that the Parisian Venus appears to have been modelled to show the entirety of the anatomy, not just that of the reproductive system. The pamphlet describes the anatomy of the face, neck and limbs in detail, while also noting, more usually, that the chest-piece could also be removed to show the abdomen, and the ‘gravid uterus’ with ‘a foetus at about the third month of utero-gestation’ (1844, 15).

17. As with the Florentine Venus, advertising material for the Parisian Venus emphasises its aesthetic appeal, and unlikelihood of offending even the most delicate sensibility:

The exquisite beauty of the Figure—formed on the model of the Venus di Midicis—is exceedingly striking, even at a first glance; but this is nothing to the perfection of workmanship which this section of the anatomy displays. It is a study for all classes; for the young of both sexes, for husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, the healthy and the unhealthy, and especially for the medical student or professor. Nor can we speak too highly of the extreme delicacy with which the whole exhibition (including all necessary explanation) is carried on. Females of the most refined sensibility will find nothing offensive obtruded on their notice; while knowledge of the most important kind is imparted in a manner of all others most calculated to impress it upon the mind.—Birmingham Advertiser, Dec 28, 1843. (1844, iii)

18. The first successful caesareans were performed during the mid-1800s, but were still far from commonplace when this Venus is likely to have been produced.

19. While both Jordanova (1989) and Didi-Huberman (1999) take Susini's eroticisation of the Venuses as given, Maritha Burmeister counters that:

Without denying the erotic component to the display of these figures, I would at the same time like to insist that these figures are not simply erotic or even primarily erotic. The meaning of the Venuses was partly constituted by the public manner in which they were advertised and viewed, just as their possible interpretations were shaped by the modelers striving to create a work of art by embodying anatomical knowledge in a female figure from another famous work of art. For anatomical Venuses on public display, one of their most important features was their ability to refer directly to medical science but in a manner devoid of corporeal reality. (2000, 51)