@a__gongju: Cigoli’s Lo Scorticato (The Flayed Man) in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florencec is considered the earliest surviving full-body anatomical model made in wax. To create it Cigoli studied human dissections at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. At a time when artists were becoming increasingly obsessed with representing the body accurately, anatomy posed an obvious problem: a dissected body could only be studied for a limited time before decomposition made further observation impossible. Wax offered a solution. It could preserve the appearance of exposed muscles in three dimensions, allowing artists to return to the same anatomical reference repeatedly rather than relying solely on drawings or gaining access to another dissection. What is especially striking is that Cigoli didn’t treat the body like a purely clinical specimen. He posed it almost like a heroic classical sculpture, merging Renaissance artistic ideals with direct anatomical observation. More than four centuries later, anatomical models used in art schools and medical education still follow essentially the same idea. #renaissance #History #arthistory
