Mistress Mummy: Dissecting the Flesh-and-Blood Venus

The Venus or female nude has been a long-standing motif in art history, from the ancient Greek marble statue of Venus de Milo to Sandro Botticelli’s fifteenth-century painting of her “birth.” By the eighteenth century, a new kind of Venus emerged in Europe’s museums that sat at the crossroads of art and anatomy: a lifelike woman made of colored wax. Donning a pearl necklace, long hair, and a touch of rouge, she was invariably displayed lying on satin sheets inside a glass display case for the titillation of a curious public. Behind her pleasing aesthetic, however, was an anatomy lesson: her life-size inner organs could be removed and replaced at will, in an almost divine act that mimicked the art of human dissection. While the “Anatomical Venus” was an important figure who dazzled audiences in such enlightened cities as Vienna, London, and Florence, we know much less about her bloodier, messier counterpart who lay on the dissecting table: the female corpse. This essay makes a case for the importance of the female corpse—what I will call the “flesh-and-blood Venus”—to anatomical inquiry. By looking at dissections of such Venuses behind closed doors, before auditoriums of eager students, and in medical imagery, this essay shows that the flesh-and-blood Venus functioned less as a spectacle than as a testament to the anatomist’s disciplinary mastery. Examples of a mummified mistress, a teenager found lifeless in a ravine, and a woman who died in the ninth month of her pregnancy will show how the female corpse was central to new forms of anatomical inquiry in such fields as childbirth and forensics. The flesh-and-blood Venus provided anatomists with a unique research site to advance new knowledge claims while displaying their disciplinary expertise.