(Their name contains a dual allusion: It refers to their resemblance to the Praxitelean sculpture Venus de’ Medici, housed in the Uffizi, and to the literal meaning of the Italian word medici, “medical.”) These figures are some of the most peculiar in La Specola’s vast collection-life-size wax nudes with sensuous, “living” faces (including human hair) and removable body cavities permitting the dissection and examination of each major organ system, also intricately sculpted in wax. He traveled to La Specola and reviewed some of its thousands of wax figures and tableaus, fossils, and preserved animals before selecting a series of female waxworks known as the Medici Venuses, created by 18th-century ceroplastic artist Clemente Susini. Also known as La Specola, the 18th-century wunderkammer traces its origins to Florence’s powerful Medici family and is located just across the Arno River from its more famous fine-arts counterpart, the Uffizi Gallery.Ĭonceiving the show as a means to introduce the Florentine institution to a wider public, it was Miuccia Prada who invited Cronenberg to collaborate. When, at last, the camera stops over the woman’s face again, she is revealed to be a wax mannequin, wearing an expression of inscrutable pleasure.Ĭronenberg’s transfixing film-titled Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection-is a central feature in the Fondazione Prada’s current “Cere Anatomiche” (anatomical waxes) exhibition, which showcases a collection of centuries-old wax sculptures from the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze, one of Europe’s oldest scientific museums. The camera trains upward along the woman’s ruptured torso, her innards laid bare from pelvis to throat. However, a tuft of pubic hair is suddenly obstructed by coils of intestine and a plexus of blood vessels and nerve endings. The camera begins to pan slowly along a pair of glistening feet and legs to the fork of her naked thighs-an erotic, if not voyeuristic, tally of the motionless woman’s most intimate anatomy. Another shot exposes her naked breast just beneath a pearl necklace and a long strand of braided hair. Then, a sliver of shimmering water appears near her outstretched hand, which rests upon a fringed pillow. The sounds of a rolling tide and cawing gulls surround her, and the tawny glow of her cheek suggests that she is sunning on the shore. She appears to be in repose, lolling on a bed of silk, but her eye is half-open and the pupil stares fixedly at a point just offscreen. And beg to be placed in a large room.” This collection, while shaking an elegant fist at “the wide hallways / of a great endowment”, is a useful dispatch from within such rooms.David Cronenberg’s new short film opens with a partial, anterior view of a woman’s face. But, as Patronage observes, in the US, “poets coo. Other less stylised pieces suggest generational trauma: An Otherwise revisits Sharif’s mother’s experience of the Iranian revolution. While everyday intimacies resemble “a little city, where / I’m most grateful to be alive”, the only words on the following page, placed amid three pairs of closed square brackets, are “ Of / is such a little city.” This 22-page poem, Without Which, then moves to an encounter with a homeless man, “thin as a second hand” – a sympathetic pun concerning his hand-me-down clothes – before ending in a black page. Customs is her second collection, and in it she makes use of fashionable ellipses to create a poetics of understatement. The much garlanded Iranian-American poet was born in Istanbul in 1983. Customs by Solmaz Sharif ( Bloomsbury, £9.99)
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