Museum of Natural History, La Specola
Eighteenth-century anatomical wax collection of dissected life-size figures, once the world's first public science museum.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Florence's La Specola opens with the painter Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun's 1792 visit, when an attendant opened the chest of a life-size wax woman and she found herself unable to look at a living body the same way again. From there it goes back to Grand Duke Peter Leopold, who opened this museum for free public study of anatomy in 1775, and to Clemente Susini, the young Florentine modeler who built that wax figure from real cadavers under Peter Leopold's patronage.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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