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From: Rebecca Messbarger, Anna Morandi’s Wax Self-Portrait with Brain. In Stanley Finger, Dahlia W. Zaidel, François Boller and Julien Bogousslavsky,

editors: Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 203, Amsterdam: The Netherlands, 2013, pp. 75-93.

ISBN: 978-0-444-62730-8 © Copyright 2013 Elsevier B.V.

Elsevier

CHAPTER

Anna Morandi’s WaxSelf-Portrait with Brain 3

Rebecca Messbarger1

Department of Romance Languages, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA1Corresponding author: Tel.: !1-314-935-5478; Fax: !1-314-726-3494,

e-mail address: [email protected]

AbstractIn her self-portrait in wax, eighteenth-century Bolognese anatomist and anatomical modelerAnna Morandi Manzolini (1714–1774) represented herself in sumptuous aristocratic dresswhile dissecting a human brain. This essay explores the scientific and symbolic meaning ofthe vivid self-portrayal in terms of Anna Morandi’s lifework at the intersection of art andanatomical science and within the remarkable cultural context of Enlightenment Bologna thatfostered her rise to international acclaim.

KeywordsAnna Morandi, Pope Benedict XIV Lambertini, Giovanni Manzolini, anatomy, anatomicalwax figures, Enlightenment, eighteenth-century Bologna, neuroscience, cognition, Albrechtvon Haller, irritability, sensory perception

1 THE CONTEXTWecandeducebyall that hasbeen said that the fantasyor the imagination is in itselfnothing other than that wondrous book of the human brain in which are imprintedboth intellectual notions aswell as images of sensible objects collected by the senseand transmitted by means of the animal spirits through those most subtle channelsof the nerves that carry them all the way to the market place of the brain.

POPE BENEDICT XIV LAMBERTINI, De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorumcanonizatione (1738, p. 463; trans. Stefano Gulizia and Rebecca Messbarger)1

1My thanks to Stefano Gulizia for his translation of this chapter on Miracles in Benedict’s work fromLatin to Italian, from which I composed the translation into English. Unless otherwise indicated, allfuture translations from the Italian are mine.

Progress in Brain Research, Volume 203, ISSN 0079-6123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-62730-8.00003-7© 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

75

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In 1738, the academic and religious elite of Bologna, Italy, celebrated the localpublication of the fourth and final volume of the monumental work of Church legaldoctrine, translated from the Latin as, On the Beatification of the Servants of God,and the Canonization of the Blessed. Its author, Bologna’s native son and currentarchbishop Prospero Lambertini (1675–1758), would ascend the throne of SaintPeter 2 years later as Pope Benedict XIV. The 484-page Part I of this volume, ded-icated to the critical role of miracles in the processes of beatification and canoniza-tion, drew in its distinction between natural and miraculous cures directly fromBologna’s wealth of resources as a historic center of medical science (dalla Torre,1991; Veraja, 1992). In preparing the section on miracles, the archbishop hadconsulted doctors of medicine at the ancient university, as well as the university’srich holdings of scientific literature, in order to establish firm boundaries betweenthe natural functions of the body and supernatural intervention, of utmost importancefor assessing claims to miracles (Saccenti, 2011).

Archbishop Lambertini was, however, no novice in medical science. During his20-year tenure (1708–1731) as Promoter of the Faith, better known as the Devil’s Advo-cate, Lambertini had applied a rigorous forensic methodology to dispute hundreds ofclaims to sainthood and miracles, principally by means of modern medical literatureand his own direct knowledge of contemporary medical theories and practices(Dacome, 2009; Duffin, 2009: 12–31). Lambertini’s training in medical science hadtaken place under the tutelage of Roman physicians, above all Giovanni Maria Lancisi(1654–1720), the chief physician to three popes, whose medical theories were based oncase studies and observed physical evidence obtainedmainly during dissection (Donato,2010: 148–158). Pope Benedict XIV Lambertini’s treatise on beatification and canoni-zation, which still guides the procedures today, is testament to his erudition in canon lawand his experience on the ground, so to speak, as the Church’s defender of truth in sanc-tity. Further, the extended section on miracles reflects his deep knowledge and endorse-ment of experimental medicine (Donato, 2010; Vidal, 2007). This endorsement playedout in Bologna in explicit and transformative ways for the cultural life of the city.

From the moment of Lambertini’s return home as archbishop through his 18-yearpapacy, he viewed the development of medical science as a prime means for restor-ing Bologna’s former standing as a leading European academic center. While arch-bishop, he regularly attended the annual Public Anatomy in the university anatomicaltheater. In a published notification, he directed Bologna’s priests to persuade theirparishioners to give up their dead kin for the publicly useful purpose of dissection.From Rome, he appointed the noted physician Pier Paolo Molinelli to the first chairof surgery in Bologna for the necessary instruction of new surgeons in humandissection. He established the first chair of obstetrics and the use of obstetricalmodels for the training of midwives and surgeons in female reproductive anatomyand modern techniques in child delivery. He commissioned the first museum of anat-omy in Italy, which displayed spectacular life-size wax models of the anatomizedbody in Bologna’s prestigious Istituto delle Scienze, a center of modern scientificpractice that he also helped to develop (Messbarger, 2010: 20–51).

76 CHAPTER 3 Anna Morandi’s Wax Self-Portrait with Brain


In all of these endeavors, he was keenly interested in advancing understandingof the structures and functions of the parts of the human body, from the musclesto the bones, the sensory organs to the nervous system and the brain. Indeed, asevidenced in his doctrine on miracles, in which he cites a who’s who of recenttheorists on the anatomy and physiology of the brain, including Thomas Willis,Marcello Malpighi, Rene Descartes, Daniel Sennert, and Thomas Fienus, Lambertiniwas in fact engaged in the early stages of what Charles T. Wolfe has expressivelydescribed as “eighteenth-century neuromania” (Wolfe, forthcoming: 9).2 In his anal-ysis of the corporeal origins and natural and possibly supernatural effects of imag-ination, for example, Lambertini begins by summarizing current thinking on theanatomy of perception and cognition. He discusses the nerves and spinal cord “thatrepresent an extension of the brain, or a product flowing in the eyes, the ears, to thenostrils, to the tongue, to the hands, where the sense of touch is found.” On the originof ideas, he writes that “insensible and spiritual things, by means of sensible things,are impressed on the human brain or, so to speak, in the substance of its wrinkles, itspits and folds, and its notes, in such a way that virtually all of the characteristics thatmark objects, both material and immaterial that form ideas, are stored for the future”(Benedict XIV, 1738: 462–463). As Fernando Vidal has observed, Lambertini“participated in the nascent remaking of the sciences of the soul into ‘sciences ofthe mind’” (Vidal, 2013: 17).3

More than any other figure, Pope Benedict XIV Lambertini influenced medicalculture in Bologna in the first half of the eighteenth century. His dynamic engage-ment with contemporary medical theories and advocacy of modern scientificmethods shaped what and how medicine was done in Bologna for 30 years. Theleitmotifs of his master juridical tract concerning anatomy and medicine, includingneuroanatomy and science, were known and espoused by many Bolognese academi-cians and medical practitioners at the time.4 And it was in this resurgent milieu formedical science that anatomist and anatomical modeler Anna Morandi would de-velop her art and science of the human body.

2My thanks to professor Wolfe for sharing this and other relevant forthcoming articles.3Vidal explains the difference as a change from a focus on the “physiological connection of soul andbody” in the early modern scientia de anima to an emphasis expressed in Lambertini’s analysis ofmiracles on the “intangible powers” of the imagination that exceed causal explanation. Basing hisjudgment only on observed corporeal events, Lambertini concludes that it is not possible to determineif the imagination produces miracles (p. 17). I am grateful to professor Vidal for sharing this forthcom-ing work.4Not only was the treatise immediately reviewed in major literary journals like Osservazioni letterariewith circulation across the peninsula, Lambertini’s unedited correspondence with numerous membersof the scientific community in Bologna, held in the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, manifest theinvolvement in the project by the local academic class. My sincere thanks to Maria Teresa Fattori forindicating these documents.

771 The context


2 THE ANATOMISTWith a virile soul, oblivious to the cadavers’ stench, and heedless of the feebleweakness of her own sex, she decided to give (her husband) aid in that thanklessand difficult work (of dissection). The illustrious Signora learned to create in waxnot only the major parts, but she was the first to dare to form in wax and othermaterials those most subtle and diaphanous parts of the body that would escapeour very sight. And all this she dared with such ability, with such realism, and suchhappy results as I have already described.

Luigi Galvani, De Manzoliniana Supellegtili Oratio (1776, reprint 1988, p. 102)

The actors in Anna Morandi’s wax anatomical theater are the dynamic parts andstructures of the living human body. All of Morandi’s hundreds of naturalisticmodels of organs, bodily systems, even the bony infrastructure uncovered at theend of each series as in dissection, express the body in life and often in motion. Skel-etal forearms flex, reach, and grip (Fig. 1); anatomized eyeballs playfully gape in alldirections beyond their wooden display (Fig. 2); a pair of intact hands that lead theseries on the anatomy of touch articulate the opposite sensations of pain and pleasure;the right pricked by a woody spine (now lost) tensely recoils while the left languor-ously fingers a silk cushion (Fig. 3). All of Morandi’s figures are animate, that is,except two.

In her self-portrait, the filmy yellowed brain within an open skull under the com-mand of her doppelganger’s scalpel and forceps is one of only two examples of deadflesh in her vast oeuvre (Figs. 4 and 5). A dramatic prop and critical focal point in thissingular dissection scene, whose unconventional protagonist is the lavishly dressedand ornamented woman anatomist, the brain is both graphically real in its represen-tation and densely symbolic. Morandi shows herself disclosing with her surgicaltools (a forceps and scalpel now lost) the coverings and superficial structures ofthe brain, the loftiest organ of the body. Acting as three-dimensional title page toher plastic atlas of human anatomy, the self-portrait epitomizes and sublimatesher contribution to the science: the exquisite explication in colored wax of vital,interrelated structures and functions of the experiential body, particularly theanatomy of sensory perception, a foremost theme of her work, for which the brainis font and final repository (Dacome, 2005, 2007; Focaccia, 2008; Messbarger,2001, 2003, 2010).

Her bust was part of a diptych, bound to the wax portrait she created of herlate husband, the Bolognese artist and anatomical sculptor, Giovanni Manzolini(1700–1755) (Medici, 1857; Messbarger, 2010). The uncanny likeness almost cer-tainly modeled on his cadaver shows him in the act of dissecting a rust-colored hearthe palms familiarly with his left hand (Fig. 6). The dissected human heart togetherwith the anatomized brain exemplified the couple’s modern empirical method, theirhands-on exploration of the dead body. The rest of the collection instead served toillustrate the living interior of the body for the instruction of medical students and theuse and appreciation by medical practitioners and connoisseurs.



Professionally trained as artists, Anna Morandi and Giovanni Manzolini had firstmet in the prominent local studios of Giuseppe Pedretti (1694–1778) and FrancescoMonti (1685–1768); they married in 1740. Their collaboration in anatomical waxmodeling began in earnest 6 years later, following Giovanni Manzolini’s angry de-parture as chief assistant on the first AnatomyMuseum in Italy, which Pope BenedictXIV Lambertini commissioned for Bologna’s Istituto delle Scienze (Messbarger,

FIGURE 1

Anna Morandi and Giovanni Manzolini, forearm and deep musculature, wax and bone.Courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Universita di Bologna.

792 The anatomist


Figure 1

FIGURE 3

Anna Morandi, feeling hands, wax.Courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Universita di Bologna.

FIGURE 2

Anna Morandi, eyes, wax.Courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Universita di Bologna.



Figure 3

Figure 2

FIGURE 5

Anna Morandi, detail of self-portrait.Courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Universita di Bologna. My thanks to Dr. Fulvio Simoni for taking this photo.

FIGURE 4

Anna Morandi, self-portrait, wax.Courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Universita di Bologna.

812 The anatomist


Figure 5

Figure 4

2010). Having accused the project director, sculptor Ercole Lelli, of stealing creditfor his work modeling life-size figures in wax of the complete myology of the humanbody (Fig. 7), Giovanni Manzolini opened a rival modeling studio and school ofanatomy with his wife in their home (Crespi, 1769; Fantuzzi, 1786; Ferretti, 1979;Oretti, n.d.). The couple created wax anatomical models for medical professionals,avid amateurs, science academies, and courts across Europe, and Anna Morandi’sanatomical demonstrations in their home studio quickly became a mandatory stopfor European travelers on the Grand Tour (Bianchi, 1740–1792; Cusatelli, 1986;Terlinden, 1755). The set of portraits thus commemorates the couple’s remarkableprofessional alliance and contributions to the science and art of anatomy.

Equally significant, through their juxtaposition and their subversion of traditionalgender associations, the portraits serve to amplify the exceptional status of AnnaMorandi in the sphere of anatomical science. While improbably arrayed in taffeta,lace, and pearls, the woman anatomist’s surgical study of the brain, seat of the ratio-nal soul and traditionally viewed province of male supremacy, is all the more pro-vocative when compared to Manzolini’s hands-on prosection of the heart, the seat offeeling. Her husband’s unfocused gaze, melancholic mien, and anatomical subjectreinforce Anna Morandi’s distinction among master anatomists and her command,both physical and scientific, over the brain (Perini, 1988). As I will discuss in greaterdepth later in this essay, the brain–heart dichotomy at play in these portraits not only

FIGURE 6

Anna Morandi, portrait of her husband Giovanni Manzolini, wax.Courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Universita di Bologna.



Figure 6

serves to capture the couple’s professional partnership and Anna Morandi’s uniquestanding in the science but also points to their role in dominant epistemologicaldebates taking place in Bologna and across Enlightenment Europe at the time. Atfirst reading, however, the symbolism of the brain in Morandi’s self-portraitadvances the mise en scene of her scientific mastery.

3 BRAIN POWERWhen the external sensors of individual senses are struck and moved by fittingobjects, they transmit the received impression to the brain through the continuoustrack of the nerve and by means of an animal mechanism.

POPE BENEDICT XIV, De servorum Dei Beatifatione et Beatorum Canonizatione, Book IV(1738, p. 462; trans. Stefano Gulizia and Rebecca Messbarger)

FIGURE 7

Ercole Lelli, ecorche of superficial muscles, wax.Courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Universita di Bologna.

833 Brain power


Figure 7

All of the identified nerves extend to the summit and apex of the fingers and herethey multiply themselves in most copious and minute ramifications, more than inany other part, and for this reason therefore and because of the proliferation ofnerves operated by Nature, the sensation is rendered more acute and delicate thananywhere else.

ANNA MORANDI “Anatomy of the Hand,” Anatomical Notebook (ca. 1755,fol. 52 v; trans. Rebecca Messbarger)

By the time Anna Morandi created her self-portrait and the companion wax effigy ofher husband, she had risen from working-class roots and obscure standing as a localartist to international acclaim for her vibrant and meticulous anatomical waxworks.She had recently buried her husband Giovanni Manzolini, dead from “dropsy of thechest and corrosion of the liver,” in the floor of Bologna’s main Cathedral (Crespi,1769). For more than 10 years prior to his death and her takeover of their homestudio, she had been the face of the household anatomical practice, conducting onher own expert anatomy demonstrations that drew medical practitioners and GrandTourists from across Europe. Giovanni Manzolini was, in fact, never mentioned inany of the numerous published accounts of visits to their studio. According to severalof their Bolognese contemporaries, he suffered from a severely morose and acrimo-nious disposition and, for that reason presumably, remained out of public view. Bycontrast, many of these same contemporaries underscored the extraordinary “virile”strength of Anna Morandi in her dissections of putrefying cadavers, as well as herproficiency and eloquence in the anatomy demonstrations she gave before captivatedlisteners (Crespi, 1769; Fantuzzi, 1786; Zanotti, 1731–1791). On a highly personallevel, therefore, the organs she and her husband are shown anatomizing in herportraits of them allude to the defining temperament and character of each: she,the analyzing intellect, and, he, the melancholic heart.

At the same time, however, Anna Morandi’s hands-on dissection of a true-to-death brain and Giovanni’s Manzolini’s examination of a naturalistic severed heartepitomize their modern empirical method of anatomical discovery even as theirincongruous aristocratic dress symbolizes their prestige in the science. Over thecourse of their 12-year partnership, Morandi and her husband achieved internationalrecognition, creating models of the sensory organs for the Royal Society of Londonand the Procurator of Venice; wax replicas of the female reproductive system andgravid uterus for Bologna’s first school and museum of obstetrics founded by phy-sician Giovan Antonio Galli, and anatomical models for Bologna’s first Chair ofSurgery, Pier PaoloMolinelli, appointed by Pope Benedict XIV. The couple receivedcommissions from sovereigns across Italy and Europe, including King CharlesEmanuel II of Sardinia, King Charles of Naples, and King Augustus III of Poland.

After her husband’s death in 1755, Morandi won formal recognition in Bolognafor her internationally celebrated work. The Senate of Bologna, in obedience to PopeBenedict XIV’s directive, named her Public Modeler and Demonstrator of Anatomyat the University of Bologna (although she was allowed to continue to work from herhome), and awarded her a modest 300 lire annual honorarium provided she did not



move her famous anatomy practice from Bologna. Two weeks after the pope’sdeclaration of support for her, on December 3, 1755, the Clementina Academy ofArt within Bologna’s Istituto delle Scienze inducted her into its honorary ranks(Messbarger, 2010: 108–118).

Morandi’s fame derived not merely from the beauty and exactitude of her waxmodels but also from the currency of the anatomical studies she undertook with herhusband and on her own, based on extensive empirical investigations. Indeed, afterher husband’s death, it was precisely because of the threat that she might move herpioneering scientific practice to another, more obliging city that Pope BenedictXIV publicly intervened to keep her in Bologna. He well understood the value andoriginality of her three-dimensional images of the anatomical body, which recreatedthe science in literal terms. The tracts that Giovanni Manzolini and Anna Morandiwrote together and, to a greater extent, AnnaMorandi’s 250-page anatomical notebookthat was a companion piece to her collection of wax models, most clearly manifesttheir influence on the development of contemporary anatomical studies (Manzolini,1751; Morandi, n.d.). As Morandi’s self-portrayal with brain aims to manifest, thisincludes brain science. Although Morandi did not write explicitly in her notes aboutthe anatomy of the brain, as will be seen, she alone and together with her husbandproduced extensive written and visual analyses of anatomical structures essential tocontemporary neuroscience, especially sensory perception and nervous sensation.

In 1751, Bolognese professor anatomist Domenico Maria Gusmano Galeazziconducted the annual 14-day Public Anatomy, more popularly known as the CarnivalDissection, in the university’s Archiginnasio Anatomical Theater. GiovanniManzolini was one of the many attendees at the event and afterward procured fromGaleazzi, the severed head of one of the subjects used during the lessons. The35-year-old male subject had been deaf and mute for life and Manzolini and AnnaMorandi sought to do further anatomical analysis to determine if, as they theorized,the man’s muteness was the indirect result of his deafness.

After dissecting the head and examining the muscles, nerves, and component partsof the speaking apparatus, they found it without defect. Onmeticulous inspection of thetemporal bones and the anatomical parts of the ear, they discovered instead that theauditory apparatuses of both ears were extensively malformed. Among other prob-lems, the bones of the middle ear were fused, and the apex and spirals of the cochleawere missing. The result of their research was an influential tract read in March of thesame year before Bologna’s Accademia delle Scienze establishing that the subject didnot speak precisely because he was unable to hear. The mutilation of the auditoryapparatus that blocked transmission of sound and its interpretation by the brain alsoprevented development of his speech (Focaccia, 2008).5

5Manzolini concludes, “One sees that while this subject did not have any mutation (vizio) in the speechapparatus, he did have many defects in the auditory organ, such that these impeded its proper effects.Therefore it can be said that he was necessarily mute because he was born deaf,” in Focaccia (2008),trans. Messbarger, pp. 256–257.

853 Brain power


On her own after her husband’s death, Anna Morandi continued to research theanatomy of hearing, producing more precise descriptions and wax models of thestructures of the ear and improving significantly on the corrections the couple hadmade together to Anton Maria Valsalva’s foremost study on the subject, De aurehumana tractatus (Valsalva, 1704). She dedicated herself to demonstrating inthe most accurate hybrid terms, through image and word, the anatomy and physiol-ogy of all the sensory organs, with a special focus on the physical stimulus and on itsnervous and motor effect. Among the sense organs, she privileged the hand and theeye, the real means and familiar emblems of perception and cognition—knowledgederived from experience, decoded by the brain, and stockpiled as memory. Thehand and eye were, of course, the corporeal instruments most crucial to her ownscience and art of human anatomy. Her demonstration of these organs not onlyreached a consummate level of detail, including the identification of new anatomicalstructures but also practically engaged crucial leitmotifs of eighteenth-century“sensism.”6

Anna Morandi’s influential protectors were in fact academicians working at theintersection of anatomy, chemistry, and physics, and at the center of heated debatesin Bologna over sensibility, vitalism, mechanism, irritability, and electrical physiol-ogy. The couple collaborated, as we have seen, on anatomical cases with GusmanoGaleazzi, anatomist, experimental physicist, convert to Hallerian irritability, andfather-in-law to famed electrophysiologist Luigi Galvani (Messbarger, 2010).7

Jacopo Bartolomeo Beccari, professor of anatomy and chemistry also workeddirectly with the couple, defended the excellence of their work in anatomy and,as president of the Accademia delle Scienze in the Istituto delle Scienze, presentedtheir studies on the anatomy of the ear and their tract on the link between deafnessand muteness.8

Marco Antonio Leopoldo Caldani, the most vocal and controversial proponent inBologna of Albrecht von Haller’s theories of inherent irritability (Lombardi, 1828:130–133), was among Anna Morandi’s strongest defenders after her husband’s deathand served as her liaison on commissions she received from academies and univer-sities. Luigi Galvani, destined to become a leading promoter of bioelectricity throughhis famous experiments on the leg muscles of frogs,9 gave the effusive public eulogyfor Morandi, with whom he had collaborated, at the installation of her collection ofwax models in the Istituto in 1776, 2 years after her death.

6A philosophical doctrine that holds that sense experience or perception is the essential font ofknowledge.7On a particularly dramatic case that also involved the noted Bolognese physicians Tommaso Laghi,Giovan Antonio Galli, and Pier Paolo Molinelli, see Messbarger, The Lady Anatomist, pp. 95–98.8Notably, Beccari also had strong ties to Gianbattista Beccaria, the leading proponent in Italy ofBenjamin Franklin’s electrical theories.9On Galvani’s complex role on the development of the theory of animal electricity, see Finger andPiccolino (2011), pp. 307–325.



In the broadest sense, the crux of the debates that involved all of these academicfigures was the distinction between “natural” perception and higher-level sensibility.Bolognese physicians and scientists for decades sought to uncover empirically and toquantify the precise properties that made some life-matter (muscle fibers) react tostimuli spontaneously by contractions without “transmitting the impression to thesoul,” and that prompted sensible matter and organs to transmit the impression ofobjects by means of the nerves to the soul within the brain. Although there are norecords of the couple’s explicit involvement in the controversies over the propertiesof “animated anatomy” and Giovanni Manzolini died the very year that Albrecht vonHaller’s theories first gripped Bologna’s academic class,10 Anna Morandi’s visual-ization at the height of this controversy of her husband dissecting a heart and herselfdissecting a brain must be read as testament to their decisive roles in the new anatomyof knowledge. Their long time collaboration with the central actors in this debate andthe intensive focus of their written and wax analyses on the organs of sense, inparticular Morandi’s study of the anatomy of pleasure and pain, unmistakably linksthem to this chief scientific polemic in Bologna at the time—a linkMorandi no doubtsought to underscore by means of her two portraits.

The heart and the brain epitomized, respectively, the difference between irritableand sensible life matter. At the moment that Morandi created her portraits, proponentsofHallerian irritabilitywere, in fact, zealously cutting the still pumping great muscle ofthe body, the heart, from countless living cats and dogs in Bologna to demonstrate thereflexive property stored in muscle tissue, the vis insita, which permitted contractionliterally without recourse of the nerves to the brain. The structure of the brain wasstudied at the same time to uncover how it functioned as the origin and terminus ofsensibility and, in humans, as the seat of the rational soul (Bresadola, 2011;Cavazza, 1997a,b; Focaccia and Simili, 2007; Heilbrun, 1991). Morandi thus alignsher husband scientifically in her portrait of him with the motor reflex of the heart, justas she ties him personally to the heart’s passions. In contrast, she affiliates herself withthe study of conscious sensation, which begins and ends with the brain, even as shejoins her authority and character to the cognitive powers of this supreme organ.

4 THE CRANKLING BRAINThe substance of the brain is seen to be plowed, or laid as it were with furrows;out of which arise banks or ridges of broken crevices, not in a direct series butcross-wise.

THOMAS WILLIS, The Anatomy of the Brain (1681, p. 59)

10The influential Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) advanced the theory of irrita-bility or muscle reflexivity: “I call that part of the human body irritable, which becomes shorter uponbeing touched.” He contrasted this property of muscle fibers with sensibility: “I call that part of thehuman body, which upon being touched transmits the impression of it (via the nerves) to the soul”(Haller, 1755, pp. 4–5).

874 The crankling brain


In their analysis of the predominant ways in which the brain was represented from theRenaissance through the nineteenth century, historians of medicine Edwin Clarkeand Kenneth Dewhurst stress the primitivism of most illustrations. The artist ofVesalius’s Fabrica, they assert, “seems to have gone out of his way to make thecerebral convolutions look like small intestines,” while the same gyri captured byCharles Estienne and Estienne de la Riviere in De dissection resemble instead “aplate of macaroni.” Eustachi’s gyri are intestine-like, Johann Vesling’s resembleclouds, and Giulio Casserio’s look like “coils of the small gut” (Clarke andDewhurst, 1996: 67–70). They find, in fact, no truly accurate depictions of the brainuntil the nineteenth century.

Notably, however, the Early Modern masters of anatomy themselves resorted tosome of these same comparisons to describe the brain. ThomasWillis saw the exteriorsurface of the cerebrum as “uneven and broken, with turnings and winding and rollingsabout almost like those of the intestines” (Willis, 1681: 59). Vesalius described theconvolutions of the cerebellum as wormlike and their slanting pathways similar tothe way “snakes and eels crawl” (Vesalius, 2007: 208). These analogies and others likethem in Early Modern anatomical illustration are not idle or illiterate, of course, butreflect shared notions of the consonant processes that take place in parts of the bodythat appeared similar in form.Whether for the conversion of food in the channels of thedigestive tract into refined blood and spirit, the long uphill extraction of animal spiritfrom blood as it rises through the vertebral and carotid arteries to the head and is sentthrough the press of the brain, or the distillation and perfection of semen during itsintricate route through the canals of the epididymis and vas deferens, the intestines,the male sex, and the brain and its vessels are, in Willis’s words, distillatory organs.They are alembics for critical iatrochemical processes of the body. Dominant culturalrefrains and metaphorical inclinations imbue these descriptions of the anatomicalbody, as they pervade scientific classifications generally.

So how does the Bolognese woman anatomist depict the brain she is dissecting inher self-portrait? In adherence to the tenets of eighteenth-century empirical anatomy,her replica is a naturalistic, depersonalized archetype devoid of moralizing visualrhetoric. Although the anatomical subject is unmistakably lifeless, it does not “over-step the boundary of symbolism” and provoke the unease of a Baroquememento mori(Gombrich, 1977: 60). Hers is an empirical, “truth-to-nature” rendering of the humanbrain at once universal, particularized, and extremely precise for the time (Dastonand Galison, 2007: 17–27).

Through her partial representation of the brain in wax within a triangular openingof an actual human skull,11 Morandi depicts the various coverings that enclose andprotect the brain: the scalp with tussock of actual human hair, the real cranium, inwax the meningeal layers or membranes including the dura mater or outer meningeallining the skull, and in wax the arachnoid matter, the middle of the three coverings ofthe surface of the brain. The filmy texture of the arachnoid matter is particularly

11Not infrequently, Morandi formed her anatomical figures by applying wax directly to actual bones.



well depicted. At the point where the dura matter is shown cut or separated from thecerebrum at the interhemispheric fissure, the superior sagittal sinus can be seen(Fig. 8). Although the gyri, the rounded convolutions at the surface of the cerebralhemispheres, are accurately formed, their placement and extension are incorrectlyshown.Most obviously, the central sulcus is arrested far too low. The regular patternsof the gyri, the central sulcus with the pre- and postcentral convolutions and insula,would not be recognized and correctly represented until the end of the century.12

Ashas beennoted, notwithstanding theprecision ofher depictionof the brain, unlikethewax anatomical figures she created for use bymedical practitioners, this organ is notthe subject of the work, but a crucial prop that, like her costume, serves to heighten thenoble drama ofMorandi’s self-presentation. Moreover, from a conventional standpointin front of theportrait that is enclosed inaglass case, it is difficult for theviewer to see theexact rendering of the brain. The viewer looks at the brain at eye level and sees it fromthe side.To fullyview theorgan, theglass enclosurewould have tobeopened so that onecould to look down on it from above. The meticulousness of Morandi’s rendering ofthe brain is thus all the more remarkable given the real circumstances of its viewing.

FIGURE 8

Identification of structures in model of brain by Morandi in self-portrait by AssociateProfessor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Krikor Dikranian and Thomas Woolsey, George H.and Ethel R. Bishop Scholar in Neuroscience, Professor, Anatomy and Neurobiology,Washington University Medical School.

12My sincere thanks for their identification of the structures and inaccuracies in Morandi’s wax brain toKrikor Dikranian, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, and ThomasWoolsey, George H. and Ethel R. Bishop Scholar in Neuroscience, Professor of Anatomy and Neuro-biology, Cell Biology and Physiology, and Acting Director of the Center for the History of Medicine,both at Washington University School of Medicine.

894 The crankling brain


Figure 8

5 CONCLUSIONMinerva was born from the Brain, Vulcan with his Instruments playing themidwife; for either by this way, viz. by Wounds and Death by Anatomy and aCaesarean Birth, Truth will be brought to light or forever lye hid.

Thomas Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain (1681, p. 4)

Anna Morandi’s self-portrait closely follows the iconographic rhetoric of title pageimages and author portraits of revered anatomists, whose work she not only knew andstudied but also possessed in her sizable private archive. Like Andreas Vesalius, seenin his author portrait in the act of dissecting a man’s forearm and hand, an overtsymbol of self-knowledge, and his near contemporary and rival in anatomy AntonioMaria Valsalva (Fig. 9), shown dissecting an ear, the subject on which he was leadingmaster, in her self-portrait Morandi also accentuates her role as modern anatomicalexpositor of emblematic parts of the body. Yet, even as she remakes herself inaccordance with iconic signs of anatomical genius, by her audacious pairing of

FIGURE 9

Anton Maria Valsalva#Copyright 2004—Archivio Storico, Universita di Bologna, Tutti i dirittiriservati.



Figure 9

dissected brain and feminine dress, Morandi boldly claims an exclusive place asfemale master of the site of the “Soul in Chief.”

She casts herself as the new Vesalius, the new Valsalva, by means of her self-representation with brain. Yet, she may also be seen to assume the role of Bologna’snew Minerva, the goddess of wisdom born from Jupiter’s brain and, notably, a fore-most symbol of the ancient university city. Through her art of anatomy, Morandigives birth to the brain in the dissection scene she dominates, and by means of whichshe memorializes her scientific authority. Allusions to Minerva in the self-portraitmight also represent a subtle challenge to the official Bologna Minerva of herday, the celebrated Newtonian philosopher Laura Bassi, who, with ArchbishopLambertini’s backing, became the first woman to receive a degree from the Univer-sity of Bologna, and who was depicted in celebratory medals and portraits as thelaurel-crowned goddess (Cavazza, 1997a,b, 2009, Findlen, 1995; Franceschiniet al., 2011). In place of the “austere Newtonian Minerva,” Morandi assumes the roleof refined Minerva anatomist, whose wisdom and transmission of knowledge areembodied by the brain itself (Algarotti, 1746: 339).13

Minerva, goddess of wisdom, was also the patroness of arts and crafts. Yet, absentfrom Morandi’s portrait is any overt reference to her role as artist. She has repressedthe manual labor of her art in favor of the manual labor of her science. Needless tosay, she looked upon the human body simultaneously with dissecting and sculptingeyes, and it was precisely her training in the fine arts that allowed her to synthesizeartistically, what she had taken to pieces scientifically. In her self-portrait, she trans-formed the disarray and incoherence of the exposed cerebrum, whose putrefactionhad begun even before she cut the skull open with her saw, into a comprehensibleform, at once true and universal, functional, and, yes, beautiful in its clarity andexactitude.

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13My thanks to Carl Craver for his constructive critique of this and other sections of this essay.

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