Anatomizing Wood in the Architectural Rhetoric of Early Modern Science

In 1734 two seventeenth-century worm-eaten atlas figures in the anatomy theater in Bologna were replaced by new statues in limewood created by anatomist-sculptor Ercole Lelli. Both versions were anatomical spellati or écorchés, that is, bodies with the skin removed to display the musculature. Lelli boasted that he had dissected no fewer than fifty bodies to guarantee the accuracy of his statues. Yet, it is unlikely that the sculptures were studied as anatomical models because they functioned as supports for the baldachin over the presiding professor’s cathedra. In interrogating the tension between tool and décor, this paper focuses attention on the role that wood played in the formation of an “order of science,” perhaps an emerging strain of architectural rhetoric.

Two threads of inquiry demand attention: Lelli’s Spellati (including their lost predecessors) and the interior design of the anatomy theater itself, which is entirely wood-paneled, even the ceiling, and accented with many wood sculptures. The symbolism of wood in this period is well studied in Christological, organic, and spiritual terms; I investigate its sometimes surprising intersection with the representational priorities of Renaissance science. Further, whereas wood was common in interior decoration, it was rarely left in its natural state, as it is in Bologna’s anatomy theater. In fact, the closest precedents are the wood intarsia studioli in Urbino and Gubbio, private offices where science was embedded in humanist learning. The use of wood may merge as the “natural” choice in fashioning a scientific setting in the pre-dawn of the scientific era.