Flights

WAX MODEL COLLECTIONS

Each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim. This time in wax.

Vienna, the Josephinum: a collection of anatomic wax figures, recently renovated. On this rainy summer day another traveller besides me had wound up here – a middle-aged man, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, his hair completely grey – but he was only interested in one model, to which he dedicated a quarter of an hour, then disappeared, a mysterious smile on his lips.

I myself was planning to stay longer. I’d equipped myself with a notebook and a camera – I even had caffeinated sweets in my pockets, and a chocolate bar.

Slowly, so as not to miss out on any of the exhibition, I took tiny steps among the glass cabinets.

Model 59. A six-and-a-half-foot-tall man. Skinned. His body pleasingly woven out of muscles and tendons. Openwork. The first glance brings a shock, no doubt a reflex – the sight of a body missing its skin is in itself painful, it stings, burns, as in childhood when live flesh came peeking out from behind a skinned knee. The model has one arm back, while the right, raised over his head in the graceful motion of an antique sculpture, shields his eyes – as though he were looking into the sun in the distance. We know this gesture from paintings – this is how one looks into the future. Model 59 could also be displayed at the nearby Museum of Art; in fact I don’t know why it’s been sentenced to live out its days in a humiliating Anatomy Museum. It really should appear in the finest art gallery, because it’s doubly a work of art – because of its brilliant execution in wax (this is evidently naturalism’s greatest achievement), but also because of the design of the body itself. Who is its creator?

Model 60 also presents muscles and tendons, but above all our attention is drawn to the gentle ribbon of the intestines, given perfect proportions here. Their smooth surface reflects the museum’s windows. Only after a moment, stunned, do I realize this is a woman – decked in a strange pendant, a piece of grey fur glued onto the base of the abdomen, containing a somewhat crudely marked oblong slit. Evidently the model’s creator wanted to make absolutely certain that the viewer, presumably inexpert in anatomy, understood that he or she was seeing feminine intestines. Here we have the hirsute stamp, the gender trademark, the female logo. Model 60 presents the circulatory and lymphatic systems as an intestinal halo. Most of the blood vessels rest on the muscles, but some of them are shown as a kind of aerial grid; only here can you see the fractal wonder of those red threads.

Next there are arms, legs, stomachs and hearts. Each model is laid out carefully on a piece of silk that glimmers in a pearlescent manner. The kidneys grow out of the bladder like two anemones. ‘Lower limb and blood vessels,’ an inscription announces in three languages. The grid of abdominal lymph vessels, lymph nodes, the pins and stars with which an unknown hand has ornamented the monotony of muscles. Lymphatic vessels could be jewellers’ models.

In the centre of this wax collection rests model 244, the most beautiful of all, the one that so interested the man in the wire-rimmed glasses and that is about to capture my attention, too, for half an hour.

It is a woman lying down, nearly intact; only in one place has her body been interfered with: her opened stomach shows to pilgrims like ourselves the reproductive system, pressed up against the diaphragm, the uterus under its ovarian cap. Here, too, that fur seal of gender, utterly superfluous. There can certainly be no doubt this one is a woman. The pubis meticulously covered with fake hair, and below, done with great care, the opening of the vagina, difficult to spot, only for the persistent who don’t hesitate to crouch down next to the small feet with their reddened toes, as that man in glasses did. And I think: it’s a good thing he’s gone, now it’s my turn.

The woman has light-coloured hair, worn loose, slightly shut eyes and half-parted lips – you can just see the tips of her teeth. On her neck a string of pearls. I am struck by the absolute innocence of her lungs, smooth and silky just beneath the pearls; they obviously never drew smoke from a cigarette. They could be the lungs of an angel. The heart, cut transversely, reveals its dual nature, both chambers lined with the velour of red tissue intended for unvaried motion. The liver wraps around the stomach like a big bloody mouth. Also visible are her kidneys and ureters, which look like a mandrake root resting atop her uterus. The uterus is a muscle very pleasing to the eye – slim and shapely; it’s hard to imagine it travelling around the body and provoking hysteria, as was once believed. There can be no doubt – the organs are packed painstakingly inside the body, preparations for a major journey. So, too, her vagina, cut lengthwise, reveals its secret, the short tunnel that is actually a dead end and appears utterly useless, since it’s not really an entrance into her insides. It ends in a blind chamber.

Exhausted, I sat down by the window on the hard bench, facing the silent crowd of wax models, and let myself feel overwhelmed. What was the muscle that was squeezing my throat so tight? What was its name? Who thought up the human body, and consequently, who holds its eternal copyright?