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Dying not to see: Anna Morandi's wax model of the sense of sight

Context and contribution: this article appeared in a special issue of The Oxford Art Journal on the theme of ‘Theorizing Wax: On the Meaning of a Disappearing Medium’ edited by Hanneke Grootenboer and Allison Goudie. In her article, San Juan focuses on Anna Morandi’s (1714-1774) wax model of the human eye presents a challenge to the viewer, one that cannot simply be left within a contextual understanding of its goals. This article deploys a cross-period approach to the wax model, not by considering it in relation to 18th century anatomical experimentation but by examining its potential in the future.

Research imperatives and process: Wax sculpture has all too often been limited by claims of its lifelike appearance, and its ability to replicate the human body. San Juan argues, on the other hand, that Morandi’s model presents an assemblage of multiple parts that must be considered through spatialisation, orientation and interval rather than as a duplicate of the organic body. Within its assemblage the model offers more than one possibility, activating sight as movement, extension and liquid dispersal rather than as ocular knowledge. The potential for sight imagined in the model cannot be fulfilled by the model itself, and thus it is useful to turn to another kind of assemblage that deals with the eye’s extended possibilities. The article proposes an understanding of Morandi’s model through Dziga Vertov’s 1928 Man with a Movie Camera, considering how the model envisions a relation between the still and moving image that would become fully realized in Vertov’s experimental film. The article also represents San Juan’s engagement with questions of vision from a cross-period perspective.