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Gaetano Giulio Zumbo's Syphilis
(photo by Carl Brandon)

FLORENCE: La Specola
Wax Anatomical Museum

Italy's Zoological Museum, steps away from the Pitti Palace, contains over 600 wax models of human anatomy that are fascinating and sometimes gruesome works of art.

    Born to an aristocratic Sicilian family, possibly the son of a slave girl named Zummo, Zumbo came in 1691 to Naples, where he made the first vignette of three scenes of the plague, titled The Theater of the Plague, The Triumph of Time, and The Corruption of the Body, which he created when in Florence between February 1691 and April 1694. (In The Triumph of Time, now known simply as The Burial, a later artist added a medallion of what has always been accepted as a portrait of Zumbo.)

The Anatomical Head

(Bambi)         

     Also displayed in the Zumbo room are fragments of his Syphilis [above] that survived the 1966 flood. Finally, La Specola contains one of the seminal works for all realitic waxen images, from its own pieces of art to Madame Toussaud&146;s tourist baits, and that is what is called simply The Anatomical Head [right]. It can also claim title to Most Macabre Piece in the Most Macabre of Museums, for Zumbo created it before he had perfected the techniques for anatomical modeling that he invented. In this first experiment, he simply poured wax over a human skull and molded the details around the empty sockets.