• 1 MORGAN L.M., Icons of Life. A Cultural History of Human Embryos, Berkeley, University of California (...)
• 2 RHEINBERGER Hans-Jörg, On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay, Stanford, CA., Stanford University (...)
• 3 OED online, 2012: Model: “Something which accurately resembles or represents something else, esp. o (...)
• 4 For a more detailed discussion on ideas of ideal or perfect human anatomy, see HENDRIKSEN Marieke M (...)

2At first sight, it may seem strange to compare anatomical preparations to anatomical models, as the former are human bodies, whereas the latter represent them. However, we should keep in mind that anatomical preparations are never just bodies; there is no such thing as an unadorned anatomical preparation. A preparation—or any other man-made or object adapted by humans—always reflects cultural assumptions, and is thus inextricably connected to particular people and places.1 As Rheinberger pointed out, an anatomical preparation is a very particular object because it simultaneously is what it represents; its meaning thus stems from, and transcends, its materiality.2 Take a preparation of an arm versus an anatomical model of an arm. Although both represent an arm, only the preparation actually is an arm. In the case of the preparation, its meaning both stems from and transcends its materiality, whereas in the case of the model, its meaning does not stem from its materiality, but from its form. Anatomical preparations, as the name implies, have been carefully selected and prepared; they have been cleaned, crafted, framed. They are the pars pro toto, a selected specimen that represents a category—in this sense, they are models.3 Especially eighteenth-century anatomical preparations, which are often of normal human anatomy, selected because they were thought to represent the ideal human body, can be said to be models.4 Anatomical preparations are things that accurately resemble or represent something else, or things that are the likeness of something else; namely dead bodies and body parts that resemble, represent, are the likeness of healthy bodies and body parts. As I will show in this paper, the use of textiles in both anatomical preparations and models plays an important role in realising this resemblance and representation. Yet there is more to textiles in anatomy than that.

• 5 CUNNINGHAM Andrew, The Anatomist Anatomis’d. An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe, Fa (...)
• 6 For textile-clad preparations by Ruysch, see: http://www.kunstkamera.ru/kunstcatalogue/index.seam;j (...)

3From the sixteenth century, research and teaching of human anatomy became increasingly important in European universities. As human bodies for dissection were scarce and human tissue perishes quickly, this led to a search for methods to preserve human bodies so they could be used to demonstrate discoveries and as teaching aids. By the late seventeenth century, a group of learned men from the northern Netherlands had developed a number of techniques to make lasting wet preparations of human anatomy: injections of wax mixtures and preservation fluids. The man who employed these techniques most successfully was probably the Amsterdam apothecary and anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731).5 Ruysch frequently decorated his preparations with textiles, such as this lower leg of a child stepping on a scorpion.6

• 7 On the morality of the seventeenth-century anatomical theatre see HUISMAN Tim, The Finger of God. A (...)
• 8 van de ROEMER Gijsbert M., “From Vanitas to Veneration. The Embellishments in the Anatomical Cabine (...)
• 9 “Mijn gebeente en was voor u niet verhole, als ick in “t verborgene gemaeckt ben, [ende] als een bo (...)

4As virtually all seventeenth-century anatomical collections, theatres and illustrations, Ruysch’s collection not only served to teach human anatomy, it was full of allegorical references to the greatness of God and his creations, and to the transience of human life. Seventeenth-century anatomical theatres, demonstrations, handbooks and preparations were simultaneously moral lessons about the mortality of man.7 Even textile in anatomical preparations occasionally served a moral purpose, as Gijsbert de Roemer pointed out in a 2009 article. De Roemer shows that a reference by Ruysch to Psalm 139 indicates that he thought of his preparations as combinations of man-made and God-made fabric.8 In the Dutch standard protestant Bible translation of 1637, Psalm 139, verse 15 reads: “My bones were not hidden from you, when I was made in hidden places, and was wrought as embroidery in the depths of the earth”.9

• 10 For the relation between core disgust and mutilated human bodies, see BILDERDIJK Willem, “Antwoord (...)
• 11 RUYSCH Frederik, Alle De Ontleed- Genees- En Heelkundige Werken Van Frederik Ruysch, 3 vols. Amster (...)
• 12 Ruysch quoted in Jozien J. DRIESSEN VAN HET REVE and KOOIJMANS Luuc, “Geloof Alleen Je Eigen Ogen: (...)

6Lace and embroidery are two different things, and the sleeves and trouser legs in Ruysch’s preparations are not embroidered, but rimmed with strips of lace. However, like the embroidery references, the lace-rimmed covers in Ruysch’s preparations also have a layered meaning. The textiles on these preparations are actually a kind of napkin bandage; wrapped around the part where the hand or arm has been severed from the rest of the body, thus covering up a probably rather unsightly stump. Hence they fulfil a practical purpose: they regulate the core disgust evoked by the sight of severed body parts by covering up the most vivid reminder of that separation.10 Ruysch readily admitted that he did not only use textiles to show his devoutness, but also for a practical reason: to make them more attractive. His cabinet was open to paying visitors, and in his catalogue, Ruysch wrote that he had tried “to improve the horrible sight of dissected and severed parts with adequate decorations to such an extent that they would not discomfort the eyes, nor cause any scares or disgust”11 and that he did so “to take away the disgust, as man is naturally afraid of dead bodies and their parts”.12

• 13 On this preparation, see HENDRIKSEN, Elegant Anatomy, op. cit., chapter 4.

7Yet if Ruysch’s only aim was to avoid scaring or disgusting his visitors, why were his textile decorations so elaborate? After all, simple muslin wraps would have had pretty much the same effect, and in the course of the eighteenth century, we see that anatomist did just that: one of Ruysch’s students, Bernard Siegfried Albinus (1692-1770), made only one preparation with a lace-rimmed sleeve as a reference to Ruysch’s work, and his students, in their turn, exclusively used simple, undecorated wraps if they wanted to cover an unsightly part of a preparation.13 The answer lies in the symbolism and the vanitas character of the Ruysch collection as well as in contemporary fashion.

• 14 KOOIJMANS Luuc, Death Defied: The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch, trans. Diane Webb, Vol. 1872- (...)
• 15 KRAATZ Anne, Lace: History and Fashion, London, Thames & Hudson, 1989, pp. 55-9, pp. 187-8.

8The production of lace, a fairly common activity in an early eighteenth-century household, requires precision and refinement, just like the creation of the injected anatomical preparations these laces are rimming. Hence the cloths are not simply covering up the stumps of severed limbs, but are also a reference to the refined skill of their creator—Ruysch famously nicknamed himself the “doodskunstenaar”: “death’s artist”.14 Moreover, everyone—men and children as well as women—wore profuse lace adornments on the dark, gloomy clothing that was fashionable in the late seventeenth century. In some areas, lace was even primarily a sign of masculinity.15 This partly explains the profuse lace decorations on Ruysch’s preparations: they do not just cover up unsightly stumps, they also commodify the preparations into fashionable, desirable objects—people were willing to pay to view them, and the Russian emperor Peter the Great eventually paid a substantial price for the entire collection.

• 16 KOK H. L., De geschiedenis van de laatste eer in Nederland, Lochem, Uitgeversmaatschappij de Tijdst (...)

9Finally, the lace-rimmed covers on Ruysch’s preparations stress the moral lesson that many of the preparations are intended to convey. They suggest that the lifelike yet undeniably dead preparations were once (part of) a living, breathing human being like you and me, who, either through their questionable character or unfortunate fate were snatched from life, like the child who steps on a poisonous scorpion. The lace rims are decidedly that of clothing of the living and not the death – well into the twentieth century, most people in the Netherlands were buried in designated shrouds; plain white ankle-length shirts with little or no decoration.16

• 17 KRAATZ Anne, Lace, op. cit., pp. 34-107.

10Changes in fashion in both clothing and anatomy are reflected in Albinus’s anatomical preparations, in which we also find textile covers of stumps, but of which only one was dressed in a lace-decorated sleeve. Around 1720, exactly when Albinus was coming of age, fashion started to change.17 Although men would continue to wear lace cravats and cuffs for much of the eighteenth century, they were much more subdued and a far cry from the elaborate adornments of the seventeenth century – and that is reflected in anatomical preparations, where we find no lace decorations whatsoever after the 1720s. Now it were the women who wore much more lace than men, as its qualities, such as suppleness and softness, became more and more associated with femininity. The reason Albinus still dressed one preparation with a lace-rimmed sleeve was that this particular preparation referred to a theory of Ruysch about the structure of the eye membranes: Ruysch argued he had identified a previously undescribed membrane which he called Tunica Ruyschiana, but Albinus noted that this was simply a section of an already known part of the eye; the choroid membrane. Albinus with this preparation wanted to prove Ruysch wrong, and by adorning it with a by then old-fashioned, lace-rimmed sleeve, the informed observer would immediately have understood what he meant.

• 18 BERKOWITZ Carin, “Systems of Display: the Making of Anatomical Knowledge in Enlightenment Britain”, (...)

11Moreover, whereas Ruysch’s motives in creating his anatomical preparations included the display of devoutness and the demonstration of moral lessons, Albinus and his generation were seeking to display something else in their anatomical preparations and illustrations: perfect anatomy. Albinus, in particular, was somewhat obsessed with what he called the Homo perfectus – the perfect man. In both his anatomical preparations and his monumental atlas of the human body, the Tabulae Sceleti Et Musculorum Corporis Humani, Albinus aimed to represent the ideal human body.18 For his anatomical atlas, he therefore sought a body that was

• 20 HUISMAN Tim and LUYENDIJK-ELSHOUT A. M., De Volmaakte Mens : De Anatomische Atlas Van Albinus En Wa (...)

12If it had been up to Albinus, he would not even had the decorative Arcadic landscapes as backgrounds in his atlas; it was his draftsman Jan Wandelaar who persuaded him to include them as he felt they would improve the sense of proportion.20 Textiles therefore had no place in Albinus’s illustrations and preparations, apart from the occasional bandaging of an unsightly stump.

• 21 RIVA Alessandro (ed.), Flesh and Wax: The Clemente Susini’s anatomical models in the University of (...)
• 22 LESSMANN Johanna and KÖNIG-LEIN Susanne, Wachsarbeiten des 16. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Sammlungskatal (...)

14As mentioned previously, creating lasting anatomical preparations was extremely difficult and only very few anatomists succeeded in making them. Therefore, from the late seventeenth century, anatomical wax models were produced, primarily in Italy, in an attempt to provide more durable learning aids.21 Both the choice for wax and the combination with textile in anatomical models is not surprising given the qualities of wax and the history of wax works. Wax is relatively easy to mould compared to other materials such as stone, clay or papier-mâché, and colouring can give it a very lifelike quality. Moreover, by the late seventeenth century, there was a recurrent history of the creation of life-sized effigies; sculptures of saints and other deceased people in which the head and hands were shaped in wax and attached to a fully clothed body made from other materials. From the second half of the seventeenth century, living people too were sometimes sculpted in wax, also primarily for representative purposes, and by the eighteenth century, Europe had some very popular cabinets with wax figures of famous people.22 From this it becomes instantly clear that there must have been a technical overlap, and as will soon appear also an iconographic overlap, between the creation of wax figures for memorial purposes and the creation of anatomical wax models.

• 23 MESSBARGER Rebecca, The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini, Chicago and Lo (...)
• 24 Ibid., p. 129.

16Anna Morandi never wrote anything about her use of textile representations in her waxes, but as Messbarger pointed out, she used atlases and anatomical studies by Cowper, Bidloo, Vesalius, Casserio, Morgagni and others as starting points for her own work.23 In these books, textile wraps and shrouds are also frequently used to frame partly dissected bodies. It is to this iconography rather than contemporary fashion that Anna Morandi seems to refer in her waxes, as her self-portrait in wax shows quite elaborately embroidered sleeves and a frilly dress that are a far cry from the rather plain textiles represented in the models. The only exception to this appears to be her model of “feeling hands,” in which the left hand, as Morandi herself described it “comes to rest upon a surface that it finds soft and tender, and to which it suavely adapts itself, compressing it with delight”.24 Anna Morandi, like Frederik Ruysch, was an artisan turned scholar, but unlike Ruysch she only used representations of textiles in her anatomical models if there was a very concrete reason to do so, namely to convey a concept (as in the case of touch), or to suggest lifelikeness in the same vein as the anatomical atlases she used as reference works.

• 25 The Habsburgs had a wide variety of coats of arms, and the De Medici coat was a gold shield with re (...)

17In the waxes made by the Fontana studio in Florence for La Specola in the 1770s, as well as in the waxes produced by the same studio in the 1780s for the Josephinum in Vienna, we see an altogether different use of textiles. Here no suggestion of clothing is made, yet virtually every wax model, except for the upright full body models and some fœtuses, has been positioned on a satin-like off-white piece of textile, often decorated with gold and blue trimmings and tassels. The full body models in lying positions have been provided with additional pink cushions. These colours have no connection to either the coat of arms of the founder of La Specola, the archduke Pietro Leopold, or that of the De Medici’s, the old regime whose cultural patronage he admired.25 However, if we look at a painting of Pietro Leopold and his family from approximately the same year as many of the anatomical waxes for La Specola were made, it does at once become clear that clothing of satin in light and bright colours with few frills and decorations was indeed the fashion of the day in Florence.

• 26 MAERKER Anna, Model Experts. Wax anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775-1815, Man (...)
• 27 Eighteenth-century decorative wax Venuses can, amongst others, be found in the collection of the He (...)

18Moreover, the waxes of La Specola came from a studio headed by Felice Fontana, physician to the grand duke, but were made by a team of physicians and artisan wax modellers. Although the lines between professions could be very vague in the late eighteenth century, the latter had often started their career creating portraits and effigies, and continued to do so after they had taken up a position at La Specola.26 This connection ensured that fine art conventions were inevitably reflected in the anatomical models too. For example, the anatomical Venuses definitely have an erotic undertone, and show an almost uncanny resemblance to contemporary decorative wax sculptures of Venus. Although the position of the arms is somewhat different, both are draped sensuously on luscious, coloured fabrics, have luxuriant hairdos and wear a string of pearls around their necks.27

• 28 SKOPEC Manfred and GRÖGER Helmut, Anatomie als Kunst. Anatomische Wachsmodelle des 18. Jahrhunderts (...)
• 29 MAERKER Anna, Model Experts, op. cit.

19The references to contemporary art and fashion through textiles in the La Specola waxes may even have been an explicit idea of Pietro Leopold, as one of his primary aims with this collection was to attract and educate the citizens of Tuscany. The same textile use is found in the waxes in the Josephinum in Vienna, ordered by Pietro Leopold’s brother and produced by the La Specola workshop in the 1790s. The coloured silks and gold embroidered fringes of the pillows and drapes on which both the Florentine and Viennese waxes are lying are part of an overall fashionable presentation including gold plated rosewood and Venetian glass showcases on revolving pedestals.28 However, the Vienna collection was not primarily meant for the education of citizens, but to train surgeons and physicians. As Anna Maerker has vividly described, the iconography of the waxes backfired in this context; as the envisioned users of the models condemned them as luxury toys, unsuitable for medical training.29

• 30 HUISTRA Hieke, Preparations on the move, PhD thesis, Leiden University, 2013, Chapter 3.
• 31 The Musée Dupuytren was established in 1835 with the legacy of Guillaume Dupuytren (1777-1835), pro (...)

20From the late eighteenth century, pathology started to develop as a distinct sub discipline of anatomy. Probably not coincidental, from this period, some collections of anatomical preparations and waxes that were created in a medical context but accessible to a broad audience started to merge into collections that were primarily and often exclusively aimed at a specialist audience instead of a general one, and distinct collections aimed at the general public were developed.30 The study of pathology also necessitated the creation of moulages; wax models made from plaster casts of body parts affected by disease. In most moulages, the only textiles are bandage-like strips that cover the rough edges. Only occasionally, as in a wax model from the Parisian Musée Dupuyten, fabrics in moulages do represent clothing.31 However, this seems to be an exception, as the other moulages have no textile “framing” of any kind.

• 32 A good example of the persistent use of fabric “framing” of wax moulages can be seen in the moulage (...)
• 33 WALTHER Elfriede, “Die Herstellung einer Originalmoulage - heute ein medizinhistorisches Objekt”, D (...)

21One can wonder why a moulage needs textile framing anyway, especially as many nineteenth-century wax models aimed at a professional audience, such as those made by the Dutch model maker Petrus Koning (1787-1834), lack any form of textile framing. Yet the habit of framing moulages in textiles (either real or wax representations) seems to have persisted until the early twentieth century, after which wax moulages were slowly displaced by colour photography.32 Literature on moulages tends to focus on creation and restoration techniques, rather than the history of presentation.33 It is most likely that the use of textiles in medical moulages was originally literally meant as a frame, suggesting bandaging or sheets, and thus distracting the viewer from the fact that this is not the patient himself, but a representation of part of the patient in wax.