At such limits, Cronenberg’s images of carnal transgression often verge on a strange jouissance, not unlike the Baroque depictions of martyred saints suffering an inner ecstasy as their bodies are pierced, burned, or crucified. These films trade on the theme of the mortification of the flesh, where the extremes of scientific practice and religious desire unite around the erotic veneration of “the cut,” an action exposing the body to sacrifice and death. The filmmaker’s oeuvre has often focused on the darkest potentialities of the human body, those both erotic and clinical, beginning with his so-called body-horror B-films like Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977) through Reagan-era, techno-cult classics like Videodrome (1983) and Dead Ringers (1988) to his most recent surgical fantasia, Crimes of the Future (2022). Initially used in lieu of corpses by medical students and curious laypersons, the figures were the culmination of centuries of artistic and scientific developments in ceroplastics, once prized by medieval sculptors and used for royal effigies, death masks, and votive offerings before becoming popular for anatomical simulacra.Īs artifacts indebted equally to the Italian Baroque and the Enlightenment traditions, the Medici Venuses were also an ideal object of study for Cronenberg. (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. David Cronenberg’s new short film opens with a partial, anterior view of a woman’s face.
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