Collezione delle Cere Anatomiche "Luigi Cattaneo" - Bologna

Set up in 1908 at the University Institute of Normal Human Anatomy, it illustrates the efforts made by medical scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries who, having discovered the true nature of the human body, began to study its pathologies. Popularly called the “Museum of Anatomical Waxworks” because it displays models depicting parts of the human body, made to facilitate medical and anatomical studies, it contains collections on both normal and pathological anatomy, the former established between 1742 and 1790 and the latter between 1804 and 1893. It is named for Luigi Cattaneo, who taught anatomy at the University of Bologna. In the 1970s Cattaneo rediscovered and restored the original collections on human anatomy, which had suffered serious damage when the city was bombed during the Second World War. It contains the collection of the Cabinet of Anatomy of the Institute of Science, founded in 1742 by Pope Benedict XIV, who commissioned the pieces from the anatomist Ercole Lelli (1702–66). Among the sculptures on display, which are accompanied by preparatory panels, the most significant are the 8 life-size statues of “flayed figures”, made in order to study the surface and deep muscles of the human body; Adam and Eve, made with the collaboration of Domenico Piò and Ottavio Toselli, and Anna Morandi Manzolini’s famous series of hands, Self-portrait and the Bust of Giovanni Manzolini; in turn, Giovanni made the foetus with the umbilical cord and placenta. The 18th-century collection of waxworks by Clemente Susini and Giuseppe Astorri is also exquisitely crafted. The Luigi Calori Collection is annexed to the museum. Established in 1860, it is composed of over 1500 human skulls, including the one alleged to be that of Athalaric, unearthed in Barbianello, in the hills of Bologna, in 1838, and the collection of wax models and dry anatomical preparations from the old Cesare Taruffi Museum of Pathological Anatomy.