FLAYED STATUES

This is the view from the lecturer's rostrum in this intensely atmospheric space in the Archiginnasio, the old University, in Bologna. The canopy is held up by two elegant écorché figures ('gli Spellati') carved in 1734 by Ercole Lelli, the supreme artist of wax anatomical models. Looking down from the rostrum, below, to the white marble table on which bodies were dissected. 

The elaborate coffered ceiling, with its central figure of Apollo (god of medicine), dates from 1637; the walls, statues of great medics ancient and modern, and other fittings all date from 100 years later. The whole place collapsed in a 1944 bombing raid but was restored, although stripped of the paint that must originally have decorated the pine panelling.

Lelli's beautifully carved, limewood 'Spellati' adopt the same carefree, foppish poses as similarly flayed figures in old anatomy books from Vesalius (who performed public dissections in Bologna in 1539) onward. They were practical teaching aids, as well as symbolic decoration, allowing lecturers easily to point to front or back, left or right sides of their stripped musculature. The anatomy table, below, is a simple, white marble top shaped for its purpose, on an openwork base of baroque curves.