Re-membering a Body of Work: Anatomist and Anatomical Designer Anna Morandi Manzolini*

Re-membering a Body of Work: Anatomist and Anatomical Designer Anna Morandi Manzolini* REBECCA MESSBARGER Oh degna che di Lei mai nessuna età possa tacere! Luigi Galvani Standing alone inside the cramped, makeshift restoration studio on the second floor of the Department of Normal Human Anatomy at the University of Bologna, I gazed down upon my subject, the eighteenth-century Italian anatomist and anatomical wax modeler Anna Morandi Manzolini. Morandi's elaborate wax self-portrait now stood on its base against the wall, literally split at the seams. Cracks scarred her round features, ears, arms, and fingers. Her wig lay askew on her head; her elegant dress was discolored and frayed and her straw insides spilled out the back. Morandi's current ignoble state and her meager scrapwood chambers secured by a dimestore padlock seemed symbolic of her two-century long depreciation in the annals of history. And yet, this would not be the site of her final un-making, but rather of her real and conceptual re-membering. Art restorer Maricetta Parlatore painstakingly scraped the cracks clean of rotted wax; she blended resin and tinted paraffin to dress the wounds; she plied x-ray machine, digital camera, needle and thread, straw and horse hair to put Anna Morandi back together again. Parlatore polished her 280 year-old subject in preparation for Morandi's re-presentation to the world. While Parlatore readied Morandi's facsimile for the opening of the international exhibit of the restored museums of the Bolognese Institute of 123 124 / MESSBARGER Science in Palazzo Poggi in September 2000, where Morandi's work had originally been placed by the Senate of Bologna in 1776, I labored to reconstruct a more complex, though no less evocative, verbal portrait of the lady anatomist. In an earlier essay, I wrote about the remarkable life and critical contributions to anatomical science and design of Anna Morandi Manzolini. I examined the Bolognese cultural context that facilitated her rise, and compared her study of human anatomy in wax figures and theoretical writings to representations of the anatomized body by her precursors, in particular the neoclassical écorché of her compatriot and contemporary Ercole Lelli.1 This essay focuses more narrowly on the process of recovering Morandi's lifework. Through an assessment of the expanding documentation that constitutes the "facts" of Morandi's life, as well as an interrogation of the personal and political interests underpinning influential estimations of her work, I aim both to set the story straight, especially with respect to the question of Morandi's expertise and international influence in the field of anatomical science and, perhaps paradoxically, to raise doubts about the very possibility of ever establishing the "straight" story. The loss of critical pages and the partiality of each narrator, from Morandi herself to current biographers (including myself), impede a definitive telling of her story. Morandi's wax self-portrait represents the most evocative narrative of her lifework, and one with which all other accounts must necessarily contend, (fig. 1) In this visual autobiography, she depicts herself outfitted both with dissecting instruments—a scalpel and forceps (now lost), as well as feminine finery—taffeta, lace and faux jewels. This disquieting, even defiant, pastiche of conventionally alien signs silently proclaims her distinction in the field of anatomical science. She is a lady anatomist, a spectacular paradox manifested by the distance between her form and her function. Elegantly arrayed and casting her serene gaze outward at her viewers, her hands ready to penetrate the human brain shown on the slab before her. In place of the customary zendado of her social class,2 her attire connotes high social status and is unmistakably meant to countervail the ignoble task of anatomizing the contents of the open skull, as well as to underscore her sex.3 Yet this marriage of dichotomous signs—ornate jewelry and scalpel; sumptuous raiment and anatomized body parts—is not fully joined. The seat of knowledge that lies quite literally in her feminine grasp is a clear provocation to those who would doubt women's intellectual authority. Juxtaposed with Morandi's image and extending its connotations is the wax bust she sculpted of her husband Giovanni Manzolini that shows him dissecting...