Il Bolognese Anatomical Museum “Luigi Cattaneo”, commonly called “the anatomical waxes” or “Bologna anatomy museum“, because it displays models depicting parts of the human body created to facilitate medical anatomical study, preserves the collections of the Normal Anatomical Museum and the Pathological one, consisting of the first between 1742 and 1790, and the second between 1804 and 1893.
The Wax Anatomical Museum is dedicated to Luigi Cattaneo, professor of Anatomy at the University, who is credited with the rediscovery and restoration in the Seventies of the original Human Anatomy collections, severely damaged by the bombings of the last world war.
The Bologna Anatomical Museum preserves the collection of the Anatomy Cabinet of the Institute of Sciences, founded in 1742 by Benedict XIV, who commissioned the pieces from the anatomist Ercole Lelli (1702-1766).
What to see in the Bologna Wax Anatomical Museum
Among the exhibited sculptures, accompanied by their related preparatory panels, notable are:
- the eight statues of the Skinned, life-size, aimed at studying the superficial and deep muscles of man;
- Adam and Eve, made with the collaboration of Domenico Piò and Ottavio Toselli;
- Anna Morandi Manzolini, the famous series of hands;
- the Self-portrait and the Bust of Giovanni Manzolini;
- author of the Fetus with umbilical cord and placenta.
Of excellent craftsmanship is also the core of nineteenth-century waxes by Clemente Susini and Giuseppe Astorri. The museum is annexed to the collection of Luigi Calori, which, founded in 1860, consists of over fifteen hundred human skulls, among which the supposed Atalaric’s skull, found in 1838 in Barbianello on the Bolognese hill, and the collection of wax models and dry preparations of the former Pathological Anatomy Museum “Cesare Taruffi”.
