Eleanor Crook's Santa Medicina : an anatomical allegory in bronze and wax.

In the history of anatomical waxworks, representations of the female body have been primarily restricted to studies of the female reproductive system and stages of foetal development during pregnancy. The best-known examples of this are the highly aestheticized, full-sized waxworks of the pregnant body known as anatomical Venuses, made during the 18th and 19th centuries. A striking exception to this tradition is the wax self-portrait (c. 1740-50) made by the 18th-century anatomical modeller Anna Morandi Manzolini, in which she is posed holding a scalpel and dissecting a human brain. Eleanor Crook's Santa Medicina, a two-meter-tall bronze and wax statue commissioned by the Science Museum in London, engages with and complicates this history. Explicitly referencing Manzolini's self-portrait in wax, Santa Medicina reimagines the medical imaginary that informs the history of anatomical waxworks, contextualising this within the longer tradition or religious waxes [Publisher's text].

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