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

Rebecca Messbarger’s wonderfully illustrated and passionately argued book on the career and achievements of the first “lady anatomist,” the Bolognese artist and wax illustrator, Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714–74), goes a long way in reclaiming a place for women in the intellectual and dynamic life of a major European university of the eighteenth century, Bologna. Morandi accomplished this feat—her models in wax were displayed in the Anatomy Museum within the Institute of Science in Bologna—Messbarger argues, even though she had no degree, let alone a medical one, and at a time in which women were not allowed to teach at the university level (although one, Laura Bassi, who had graduated in 1732, was called frequently upon as a “virtuosa” of science).

Messbarger’s book is made up of seven chapters arranged in chronological order, starting with a survey of the status of anatomy in Bologna in the middle of the eighteenth century. By general acknowledgement, the once famous medical school in the city had lost much of its appeal even among regional students, let alone the international ones who had flocked there in the Renaissance. Thus, the desire of its most influential citizen, Cardinal Prospero Lambertini, the future Pope Benedict XIV, to refurbish its luster meant that the door was open to the creation of an anatomy museum. The most renowned artist working on anatomically precise rendering at the time in the city was Cesare Lelli, whose life-size ecorchés, made of wood and wax, were expansively praised by fellow artists interested in structural precision as well as by museum visitors and medical students. As an experienced aide, Morandi’s husband, Giovanni Manzolini, was fully involved with Lelli in the project of creating accurately modeled anatomical figures. Following a fallout and subsequent resignation, however—Manzolini accused Lelli of misappropriating his ideas—Manzolini started working on visualizing the human body through wax in his own home/studio in partnership with his wife. The two of them created their wax figures, concentrating especially on the structure of the arm and eye, by dissecting a vast array of cadavers—body parts were regularly delivered to them from local morgues—which they would first reduce to the bone and then reconstruct in wax.

Messbarger deftly demonstrates that not only the husband was able through observation, dissection and anatomical practice to expound a new theory, for example, of the pathology of deafness (after dissecting the auditory organ which showed an empty cochleae, he accurately observed that mutism is a consequence of congenital deafness), but also that his wife’s precise anatomical explorations made her a cartographer of the body. Indeed, Morandi’s complicated methods of wax designs gave more accurate renderings of the anatomical body than the public dissections practiced by university professors conveyed within the designated anatomical theater. To wit, her illustration of the oblique inferior muscle of the eye contributed to our understanding of the function of this organ. As evident from the color images accompanying the book, Morandi’s wax figures, all mostly complemented by voluminous notes and precise observations, also easily beat those she made with her husband. As Messbarger stresses, her reproductions “supplanted and indeed surpassed in critical ways real dissected bodies, whose defunct systems, parts, and attachments she could purify of their natural ambiguities and, using vibrant colors and three-dimensional movement, imbue with virtual life” (10).

Morandi and her husband were so well known during their lifetime that they received commissions from the king of Naples, the future Doge Alvise IV Mocenigo, as well as the king of Poland. Their house had important visitors, including foreign nobles, perhaps as a result of efforts by civic leaders to showcase the exceptional skills of a local woman. As an anonymous Belgian physician wrote in 1755, “She gives anatomy lessons to young students with a new method and the latest theories. She also told us that she has dissected 1,000 cadavers and not a...