Anna Maerker, Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775-1815

Abstract

Model Experts is a welcome addition to scholarship on the history of the wax anatomical collection of ‘La Specola’ in Florence (Museo di Storia Naturale, Sezione Zoologica). Studying the emerging role of the expert in state service through archival records, reports, gazettes, letters and ephemera from 1775 to 1815, Model Experts opens perspectives on the social and political conditions of the Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, relationships among scientific experts and the state, and notions of public education. The first section of the book examines relationships among the major figures in the development of one of Europe's first public science museums, Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo's Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History, along with the ‘politics of nature’ (p. 39) that underpinned that project. Chapter 1 sets the famed anatomical collection in that museum—with its languid decomposable wax ‘Venuses’, flayed men, and individual anatomical studies—within Pietro Leopoldo's vision of the utility of public spectacle. Ordering an end to competing popular entertainments in Tuscany, including charlatans, puppeteers and itinerant storytellers, the Grand Duke instituted a vigorous project of public entertainment and education designed to ‘enlighten the public and make it happy by making it educated’ (p. 20) as a contemporary gazette reported. That enlightenment, promoted through the institutional display of wax anatomical models at La Specola, simultaneously legitimised the ruler and the state as the executors of natural laws. Chapter 2 examines the contributions of the physician Antonio Coccchi, the obstetrician Giuseppe Gallettti, and director Felice Fontana to the development of medicine in the service of the state.