The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini (review)

The Lady Anatomist is a book I have long waited for. I visited Bologna in the late 1990s and was wonderstruck by the anatomical wax models by Anna Morandi Manzolini (1717–74), especially her remarkable wax self-portrait as a bejeweled lady in refined silk attire performing the dissection of a brain. I was then a graduate student working on the history of anatomy and tried to find something substantial written about Morandi, but, to my disbelief, I found nothing. Now, Rebecca Messbarger, professor of romance languages at Washington University at St. Louis, has filled the gap with a beautiful book based on extensive research in Italian archives and thoughtful analysis of Morandi’s work within the contexts of contemporary anatomy and learned culture.

Many readers will be surprised to learn about the exceptional support for female scientists, scholars, writers, and artists in erudite circles of Enlightenment Italy, which regarded educated women as signs of social and scientific advancement (35), despite the prevalence of scientific misogyny and widespread ideas about women’s intellectual inferiority. Morandi’s rise in Bologna’s scientific circles was promoted by some powerful men, such as archbishop Prospero Lambertini (later Pope Benedict XIV), and opposed by others. She started out as an artist, working together with her husband, anatomist Giovanni Manzolini, in their own private anatomy school and wax-modeling workshop, until his untimely death in 1755. Unlike the many wives, sisters, and daughters who worked unacknowledged alongside their scientific husbands, brothers, and fathers, Anna Morandi created a name, a position, and a livelihood for herself in anatomy. Because of her sex, she was barred from teaching at the university. Instead, she exhibited a steadily growing number of her own anatomical wax models in her home, and demonstrated them to students, physicians, and grand tourists. Some visitors entreated her to sell the exquisite models—Catherine the Great even invited her to move to St. Petersburg along with the waxes. But Morandi stayed in Bologna all her life and only sold off parts of the collection or copied series of it (e.g., to the Royal Society in London) until the very end of her life, when she badly needed financial support and had to move in with a prominent benefactor.

One of Messbarger’s most important sources is a handwritten and unpublished anatomical notebook of 250 pages, which Anna Morandi kept in her anatomical museum. It functioned as a catalog, an anatomical textbook, and a publication of anatomical discoveries, alongside the models themselves. Messbarger convincingly shows that while images from anatomy books in Morandi’s precious library (by authors such as Vesalius, Valverde, Bartholin, and Morgagni) often provided Morandi with templates for her models, she also sometimes authoritatively disputed their findings. And she did this on the basis of her own research and countless dissections, all of which she performed in her home on cadavers mainly received from Ospedale di Santa Maria della Morte (the Hospital of Saint Mary of Death!).

Interestingly, although there was much dispute at the time regarding the functions of the female organs of reproduction and their relations to the female psyche, Morandi largely avoided this part of human anatomy. Aside from a number of obstetrical models that she produced together with her husband for obstetrician Giovan Antonio Galli, she did not spend much time on the subject. Instead, she focused on male urogenital anatomy, which Messbarger interprets as a bold and smart move that allowed Morandi to subtly comment on reproductive anatomy while avoiding the hot topic of the nature of femininity in contemporary science and society. But, of course, a woman spending so much time cutting into male genitals, writing about them, and sculpting them in wax, may have seemed rather provocative in and of itself.

This brings me to a couple of problems with Messbarger’s otherwise well written and intelligent book. First, the author seems to have a...