Anatomical Venuses--beautiful, life-sized wax women reclining on velvet cushions with Venetian glass eyes, strings of pearls, and golden tiaras crowning their real human hair-- were created in 18th-century Florence to teach the general public about the mysteries of the female body. They also tacitly communicated the relationship between the human body and a divinely created cosmos; between art and science, man and woman, nature and humankind. Today, The Anatomical Venus intrigues and confounds, troubling our neat categorical divides between life and death, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, titillation and education, kitsch and art, sacred and profane.

This richly illustrated talk will explore the history--and implications--of these fascinating and complicated wax ladies. We will situate them in the larger context of beautiful, sleeping or dead women commonly found in the 18th and 19th century churches, fairgrounds and museums. We will also explore ideas of the ecstatic from the sacred to profane; the uncanny, surrealism, and the abject; gender and the study of human anatomy; sexual fetishism including necrophilia and agalmatophilia (or the attraction to dolls or statues); men who created effigies of the women they loved; and the Anatomical Venus as artistic muse.