Wax and Bone

For centuries, the only women allowed at dissections were dead. The title page of Vesalius's 1543 De humani corporis fabrica shows an anatomist opening the abdomen of a female cadaver down to the pubic bone, while a vast crowd of men jockey to see the body better, as if paying customers at a sick striptease. Private performances could be had with the "Anatomical Venus," a supine wax figure with long hair, half-lidded glass eyes, and pearls around its throat. According to historian Rebecca Messbarger, these figures were "produced in abundance in Florence at the end of the eighteenth century." The breastplate of the woman—the goddess—could be removed, followed by each layer of muscles and organs until the uterus was revealed, a fetus curled within.

These figures were likely created to assist doctors and midwives in obstetrical practices, but it is hard, now, after Law and Order: SVU and the ubiquity of the Dead Girl show, after Roe v. Wade and the ongoing dismemberment of that decision, not to see the anatomical Venus as symbolic of social—not medical—diseases, symptomatic of a world that still prefers its women as quiet as the grave, as singular of purpose. The undone Venus was the only picture in Messbarger's book—a volume full of disembodied eyes and mouths, of severed arms and legs—that made me cringe. Her wax ankles are crossed, as though she lies on a picnic blanket instead of an operating table. What would she think, rising to find her insides spilled like crumbs and the ants swarming?

But to dismiss that era (not to mention our own) as uniformly brutish and misogynistic—and to ignore the Anatomical Venus's intended purpose—is to forget about women like Anna Morandi. Before her death, in 1774, Morandi dissected more than a thousand cadavers in the home studio she shared with her husband. She incorporated her findings into countless wax models: of the hands and feet, of the ear and nose, of the intestines and deep muscles, tendons and veins. I mean incorporated literally: bones, once pared of their flesh, were often redeployed to support that flesh's wax replacement. Morandi's anatomical models were designed for medical study: she isolated discrete systems to highlight their functions and separated the working parts of sensory organs to display their complexity. This work was exquisite, and vital, and that it was done by a woman seemed to many as strange a fact as the waxworks themselves, both grotesque and beautiful, laced with taboo.

Women and their bodies had long been allegorized as Nature while men played the part of Science, tasked with discovering, taming, and understanding what couldn't possibly understand itself. "Morandi disrupts the patrilineal hold on the body," Messbarger says in 2010's The Lady Anatomist, "by upending the tradition of the male scientific observer and the female anatomical subject." The male gaze leered not only in art and literature but in the so-called science of the time. The uterus, claimed some of Morandi's male contemporaries, was the brain of the female body, ruling a woman's thoughts with its sexual, emotional needs; no wonder women were so much more fragile, less reasonable, and less intelligent than men. Morandi's very presence—not to mention the specifics of her work—refuted such lazy claims. She put the body that should have dominated her, the senses that should have distracted her, to work dismantling and rebuilding other bodies, male and female, and found no difference between them beyond the obvious. (This was generous of her, I think. If one sex were more easily swayed by the needs of its reproductive system, well …) "No corollary account of female difference or deficiency," Messbarger assures us, "attends her explanation of the process of seminal completion and male fecundity."

Contemporaries were quick to compare Morandi's scientific and artistic enterprise to more acceptably feminine pursuits: knitting and sewing and embroidery, interior design, giving birth. How hard has it been, in eras past and present, to admit to female skill, let alone genius? Let her be a sideshow instead, let...