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The University of Bologna can trace its origins back to 1088, making it the probably the oldest university in the world. Its medical school was founded around 1288; anatomy, especially the demonstrations held in the Anatomical Theatre, attracted students from across the Western world. The 16th century was perhaps the acme of its fame but by the end of the 17th century the university was in crisis, its declining roll resulting in a significant loss of lucrative foreign student fees. To address the problem it was decided to create an Institute of Sciences. Founded in 1711, it aimed to renew the university’s focus on observation and experiment as opposed to abstract theory. However, the anatomical collection of mummified human cadaver parts had deteriorated significantly with repeated use in demonstrations, so a set of durable wax models was commissioned to supplement them.
Anna Morandi’s involvement in this work came about through the artist Giovanni Manzolini, whom she married when aged 26 and still living with her parents. She had by then learned Latin and to write in a fluid style and with scientific precision. It seems she had also received some training as an artist. The project director charged with fulfilling the papal commission for a Museum of Anatomy in Bologna, in which the wax models were to be housed, was the artist Ercole Lelli. Manzolini gained a position as chief assistant to the commission, but soon clashed with Lelli over the quality of their respective models. The rift saw Manzolini resign and set up his own rival wax-modelling studio and anatomical school for medical students and interested amateurs. The facilities and work were shared with his home and wife, now aged 32 and the mother of two small boys.
The Mazolinis’ studio soon established a fine reputation for quality. After her husband’s death Morandi’s notoriety as sole proprietor, giving demonstrations via her wax studies and the dissection of cadavers, grew to the point that Grand Tourists were flocking to see her in huge numbers. Even the Emperor of Austria visited her, and she received commissions from Catherine the Great, the kings of Poland, Sardinia and Naples, and the Royal Society. The Bolognese cultural administrators realised that it was essential to keep such a popular attraction, with all the tourist money that came with it, in the city. So to that end, they offered Morandi a small stipend and a university position as anatomical demonstrator.
Morandi kept a meticulous anatomical notebook, running to 250 pages. She begins with the eye: for 20 pages she lists and explains her models of intact and sectioned eyes. She illustrated clearly the functioning of the eye and its muscles through wax depictions of eyes in different directions of gaze surrounded by an eye with the extraocular muscles splayed out (Figure 1). She also modelled dissected eyelids, corneas, retinas, tear ducts, glands and nerves. Some of her microscopic visualisations were of structures she herself discovered. The notebook description of one particular model explains that it serves to demonstrate ‘how the crystalline lens is naturally so delicate that if you touch it and lightly press it with the tip of a finger, it immediately collapses and distorts’.
The mechanical aspects of eye movements in facilitating sight were of especial concern to Morandi. Of the lacrimal gland she says: ‘At the ciliary puncta, located at the top of the grooves at the internal part of the tarsi, there are openings or excretors of the sebaceous gland of the bilateral form that serve the lymph that facilitates the movement of the lid and maintains the moistness of the eyeball.’ Her writings display her observational and experimental skills, and show that she is not afraid to disagree with other anatomists. For instance, she writes: ‘Contrary to the opinion of some authors, it is important to note that the transparent cornea is never joined to the opaque, as I have shown in all the tests I have been able to conduct.’
One of her most important original contributions to anatomy is her discovery of the course and origin of the inferior oblique muscle. In her notebook she points out the deficient current description of the muscle before adding her own, improved, version: ‘The oblique inferior muscle not only attaches to the nasal apophysis [outgrowth] of the maxillary bone, as the authorities agree, but with the bone opened, one sees that the muscle proceeds and attaches to the lacrimal sac. This was discovered by me in my observations and I have found it always to be constant.’
Unfortunately Morandi’s finances deteriorated rapidly. After her husband’s death she was surviving largely on a meagre honorarium from the university which the officers refused to increase. Less than 18 months after being widowed she was forced by her financial situation to give up her elder son, then aged eleven, to an orphanage. Facing financial ruin and in ill health, she accepted an offer from a local senator, Count Ranuzzi, to purchase her collection and provide her with an apartment in his palace.
Ranuzzi was a chancer purely concerned with making money and society connections. He purchased Morandi’s entire collection of anatomical figures for 12,000 lire in 1769. Then, in 1771, he acquired her library of anatomical atlases and texts, her dissecting and sculpting instruments and sundry other pieces for just 600 lire, to be paid in 100-lire instalments over six years. She collected only three of those instalments, as she died in 1774. In fact her bequest to her sons consisted almost entirely of the remaining payments. Ranuzzi, meanwhile, sold Morandi’s library collection to the Bolognese Senate for 16,000 lire just eight months after her death; a tidy profit.
In June 1777 the Institute of Sciences inaugurated the Manzolini Room with a marble plaque at the entrance that stated in Latin: ‘The Celebrated Works of the Anatomy of the Human Body by Anna Morandi Manzolini.’ Luigi Galvani, in his speech at the opening ceremony, praised the precision and clarity of her three-dimensional models which, in his opinion, made for clearer critical tools for students than cadavers. ‘These parts, true and natural,’ he said, ‘do not have, as cadavers do, any of the forbidding or putrid, which can nauseate or cause suffering in the tenderest of souls. On the contrary in their beauty and elegance they even stir fascination and award an almost incredible pleasure to those who study them.’
Even Galvani, though, would not admit her into the community of academic anatomists, mere woman that she was. Rather, he saw her as an outstanding artisan. There is no doubt that she was both. Her notebooks, and the 61 models now housed in the Museum of Human Anatomy of the University of Bologna attest to that. Perhaps the best tribute to her work is her own wax self-portrait (Figure 2) depicting her, dressed as a noblewoman dissecting a brain, as the ‘Lady Anatomist’.
For more detail see The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini by Rebecca Messbarger (The University of Chicago Press, 2010). ?
? David Baker is an independent optometrist