The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- A Serial Killer's Delight -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 20)

Fortunately, La Specola turns out to be fascinating (though it would have to be dire before I'd concede defeat).

The museum got its start around 1770, when a professor commissioned the wax models to train obstetricians before they went digging around in women's privates with forceps.

Over the next century or so, its workshop produced precise, three-dimensional copies of bodies to make up for the dearth of cadavers and the difficulties of storing them.

THE HUNGRY CADAVER COLLECTOR

The Florentine modelers were artists as much as anatomists, working alongside dissectors to capture every vein, artery and muscular striation in translucent colors (pity their cadaver collector, who had to trawl the hospitals with a wicker basket, complaining that he often didn't have time to eat—presumably restaurateurs didn't rush to serve him).

By the end of the eighteenth century, their work had helped convince Enlightenment thinkers that men and women were different in every way, popularizing the idea of the 'opposite sex' that's culminated in the now-popular view of sexuality as the end all and be all of a person's identity.

From the ancient view of women being 'men turned outside in,' the pendulum of misperception began to swing the other way.

Whether it's the low fluorescent lighting, the glass-and-wood display cases, or the wax effigies themselves, everything about La Specola has an antiquated, yellowish tint.

The rooms contain case after case of flayed and disemboweled male and female bodies, as well as countless limbs and organs in various stages of dissection.

Many of the reclining waxworks have faces, with the men wearing powdered wigs and the women waist-length hair.

Obviously, I'm out a century or two, but their flowing locks and classical features remind me of the Venus of Urbino—or maybe Botticelli's Birth of Venus—

—only with their guts hanging out.

If this sounds gruesome, well, it is: La Specola would probably be a serial-killer's delight.

In a last stab at credibility, though, I should point out that La Specola supposedly inspired the skin-peeling effects in Paul Verhoeven's invisible-man movie, Hollow Man, and Jean-Paul Gaultier once hosted a fashion show here, inspiring a fashionista to deem the museum 'the most contemporary place I've been in for some time':

'The flayed wax figures really speak to our contemporary consciousness, our obsession looking into the body—whether we're talking about Damien Hirst or AIDS.'

Or talking out our collective, contemporary backside.