Author of the entry: Eleonora Loiodice
In the underground cavea of the Sansevero Chapel, a space in which Prince Raimondo had intended to house the Cristo velato (cf. entry 5) and the tombs of his descendants (di Sangro 2018, p. 32), the Macchine anatomiche are now displayed in cases made of glass and wood, and have become an integral part of the Museum’s identity and the interest it attracts. The Breve nota di quel che si vede in casa del principe di Sansevero don Raimondo di Sangro nella città di Napoli (1769, pp. 21–24; cf. Attanasio 2011, pp. 61–62) records that Raimondo di Sangro had originally placed these two figures in the Fenice apartment of his family palace: ‘two anatomical machines are on show, or, more precisely, two skeletons, of a male and a female, in which all the veins and arteries of the human body, made by injection, may be observed’ (Breve nota 1769, p. 22). They are also described in the detailed and astonished account given by Donato Andrea Fantoni (1977, p. 51) during his journey to Naples in 1769: ‘I saw two anatomised machines, of a man and a woman, kept in two separate cabinets’. The two models remained in the apartment at least until 1771, as documented by the inventory of the Prince’s estate compiled in that year (fol. 60r; cf. Attanasio 2011, p. 96). By 1856, however, Camillo Napoleone Sasso (p. 200) records the presence of the two Macchine in the Chapel.
According to a particularly persistent legend, it is said to have been Di Sangro himself who, in the laboratory where he conducted his experiments and studies on palingenesis, injected a substance capable of petrifying and immortalising the arterial and venous systems of two of his servants (Colonna di Stigliano 1895, p. 121; Macci 2006, p. 27). In reality, the two angiographic figures are the work of the Palermitan priest and anatomopathologist Giuseppe Salerno. At the woman’s feet lay the foetus of the child who had died with her (Attanasio 2011, p. 62), described by Fantoni (1977, p. 51) in the palace as ‘well preserved and executed’, despite consisting of ‘minute parts’, ‘liable to break during handling and to deteriorate over time’. The foetus was, however, stolen from the Chapel by unknown persons between 1983 and 1986; by that time, only a few fragments appear to have survived, and it was no longer connected to the adult figure by the umbilical cord.
The first anatomical machine, the male, was exhibited on 5 May 1756 at the Accademia Medica of Palermo, where, ‘in the presence of His Excellency the Viceroy Don Giovanni Fogliani, and before an assembly of learned men, in this our academy our anatomist and physician, Doctor Giuseppe Salerno, priest of Palermo, displayed a skeleton worked with the utmost refinement in every part’ (translation from De Gregorio e Russo 1762, p. 246). The news reached King Charles of Bourbon in Naples, who invited Salerno to give a lecture on his anatomical model to physicians and men of letters. Among those present was the Prince of Sansevero, who, having seen the machine, purchased it for display in his palace and invited Salerno to work for him. Attanasio (2011, p. 95) suggests that the female anatomical machine may also have been produced independently by Salerno and given to the Prince at a later date. This hypothesis derives from the preface to the Opuscoli di autori siciliani (De Gregorio e Russo 1762, p. XVI), which records that Salerno made three additional figures: ‘two of women and one of a man’. It follows that one female machine was supplied to the Prince, identifiable with the exemplar now in the Chapel, while the other pair, described by Giovanni Gorgone (1801–1868), must have remained at the University of Palermo, where all trace of them was lost (Pitrè 1868, p. 53).
Documents preserved in the Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli (Nappi 2010, pp. 36–37, docs. 68–70) show that the Prince made payments to Salerno between 1763 and 1765, and that the latter, in a contract signed with Sansevero on 1 February 1763, undertook to provide his services for 2,000 ducats, payable in instalments of 150 ducats per year. On 22 April 1765, the carpenter Alessandro Ciulli was also paid seven ducats for supplying a cabinet to house a skeleton (ibid., p. 37, doc. 71). According to the same payment records (ibid., p. 21), Salerno probably worked on a property belonging to the Prince situated opposite the church of Sant’Eframo Nuovo.
Salerno’s work needs to be situated within a broader context. He studied with Giuseppe Mastiani (1715–1756), whose teacher had been Jacques-Bénigne Winslow (1669–1760). Winslow had learned the art of preparing corpses in the Netherlands, where he had met Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731), renowned for his mummies, embalmed using a technique involving injection. More generally, the eighteenth century was the golden age of anatomical wax modelling. The body was to be studied; and, given the difficulty of obtaining corpses, it was reproduced in wax as a complex mechanism to be examined. Well-known centres include Bologna, with Ercole Lelli (1702–1766), Anna Morandi (1714–1774), and Giovanni Manzolini (1700–1774); Florence, with Felice Fontana (1730–1805) and Clemente Michelangelo Susini (1754–1814), remembered for the anatomical Venuses (de Ceglia 2005); Ferrara, with wax models used for obstetric training; Pavia and Milan; and finally the Sicilian tradition, to which Salerno belongs. This tradition began with Giovanni and Jacopo Matinati in the late fifteenth century and continued through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, culminating in figures such as Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (1656–1701), whose wax models are preserved at the Museo di Storia Naturale La Specola of the University of Florence (cf. Gerbino 2013, pp. 6–29, 223–228). A contemporary of Salerno was Paolo Graffeo, whose osteographic models are now lost.
Salerno’s Macchine anatomiche present a complex and delicate network of arteries, veins, and capillaries of varying thickness, colour, and length. In 2007, Lucia Dacome and Renata Peters demonstrated that the circulatory system is composed of iron wire and a particular type of wax. The bones are held together by pins, nails, and metal wires. Both figures include most of the bones of the human body, although many are incorrectly positioned. The skulls have been sawn open, and hinges on either side allow them to be opened, revealing a dense network of blood vessels within. The condition of the uterus suggests that the woman may have died during or shortly after childbirth; and a study co-ordinated in 2013 by Matteo Della Monica established that the models display several cardiovascular anomalies, probably reflecting incomplete anatomical knowledge.
The Macchine, significantly placed in the Fenice room, named after the bird associated with the myth of resurrection, evoke the arrested stillness of death. At the time, debate around the question of the end of life sought to determine whether it was ‘a process of disaggregation of the corporeal machine’ (Donato 2014, p. 205), as mechanistic theories proposed, or the ‘loss of a material essence and immaterial principle that is life/soul’, as maintained by vitalists (ibid., p. 207). Di Sangro, an eclectic scholar, addressed the themes of death and resurrection through his inventions and investigations, including those concerning palingenesis, as well as through the works housed in the Chapel. Within this broader and complex debate, he may also have sought to understand, not least through the study of the Macchine anatomiche, whether death is a process or an instantaneous event, and whether the human body, when considered as a machine, might be reanimated or brought back to life, phoenix-like.
Essential bibliography on the work
De Gregorio e Russo Giuseppe, Epistola de notatu dignis Regalis Panh. Medicorum Academia, in Opuscoli di autori siciliani, VII, Palermo, per Pietro Bentivenga, 1762, pp. XIII–XVIII, 237–250, esp. pp. XVI, 246.
Breve nota di quel che si vede in casa del principe di Sansevero don Raimondo di Sangro nella città di Napoli, [Naples] 1769, pp. 21–24.
Inventario de’ beni rimasti nell’eredità del fu eccellentissimo don Raimondo di Sangro principe di Sansevero, Naples, notary Francesco de Maggio, 1771, copy of the document held at the Archivio Storico del Pio Monte della Misericordia di Napoli, d’Aquino di Caramanico collection, provisional shelfmark A.162, fol. 60r.
Sasso Camillo Napoleone, Napoli monumentale ossia storia dei monumenti di Napoli…, Naples 1856, pp. 195–200, esp. p. 200.
Colonna di Stigliano Fabio, ‘La Cappella Sansevero e D. Raimondo di Sangro’, in Napoli nobilissima, IV, 1895, 8, pp. 116–121, esp. p. 121.
Fantoni Donato Andrea, Diario di viaggio e lettere. 1766–1770, Anna Maria Pedrocchi (ed.), Bergamo 1977, p. 51.
Dacome Lucia and Peters Renata, ‘Fabricating the Body: The Anatomical Machines of the Prince of Sansevero’, in Objects Specialty Group Postprints, XIV, Virginia Greene, Patricia Griffin and Christine Del Re (eds), Washington 2007, pp. 161–177.
Nappi Eduardo, Dai numeri la verità. Nuovi documenti sulla famiglia, i palazzi e la Cappella dei Sansevero, Naples 2010, pp. 36–37, docs. 68–71.
Attanasio Sergio, In casa del principe di Sansevero. Architettura, invenzioni, inventari, Naples 2011, pp. 61–62, 95–96.
Della Monica Matteo et al., ‘Science, Art, and Mystery in the Statues and in the Anatomical Machines of the Prince of Sansevero: The Masterpieces of the Sansevero Chapel’, in American Journal of Medical Genetics, 161 A (11), 2013, pp. 2920–2929.
de Ceglia Francesco Paolo, ‘The Fantastic Anatomy of Raimondo de Sangro, Prince of Sansevero’, in Medicina nei secoli, XXXII, 2020, 2, pp. 657–678.
Raimondo di Sangro. Cronaca di vita e opere, Fabrizio Masucci and Leen Spruit (eds), Naples 2020, pp. 201–203, 239, 241–242.
Papa Veronica, Esposito Carla, Galassi Francesco M. and Varotto Elena, ‘Le Macchine anatomiche della Cappella Sansevero: considerazioni storiche e paleopatologiche’, in Acta Palaeomedica. International Journal of Palaeomedicine, 2021, no. 1, pp. 29–37.
Del Pizzo Silvio, Di Ciaccio Fabiana, Gaglione Salvatore, Galassi Francesco M., Papa Veronica and Varotto Elena, ‘The 3D Reconstruction of the Sansevero Chapel Anatomical Machines: a Geomatic Challenge’, in The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, XLVIII-2/W4-2024, pp. 173–179.
Comparative bibliography
Pitrè Giuseppe, Della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Gorgone, Palermo 1868, pp. 7, 53, 59.
Gregorio Tolosa da Napoli, Insediamenti cappuccini in Napoli e Terra di Lavoro nel ‘500…, Pietro Zarrella (ed.), Naples 1999, p. 103.
de Ceglia Francesco Paolo, ‘Sventrare Venere e scorticare Marsia. Corpo femminile e corpo maschile nelle cere anatomiche della Specola fiorentina’, in La stella nova. Atti del III convegno annuale sulla Comunicazione della Scienza, Nico Pitrelli and Giancarlo Sturloni (eds), Milan 2005, pp. 69–76.
Macci Fazio, Museo Cappella Sansevero, Naples 2006, p. 27.
De Renzi Silvia, ‘Medical Competence, Anatomy, and the Polity in Seventeenth-Century Rome’, in Renaissance Studies, XXI, 2007, 4, pp. 551–567.
Piedimonte Antonio Emanuele, Raimondo di Sangro principe di Sansevero. La vita, le invenzioni, le opere, i libri, le leggende, i misteri, la Cappella, Naples 2012, p. 43.
Gerbino Filippo Maria, Civiltà plastica tra arte e manufatto. La ceroplastica in Sicilia tra ‘700 e ‘800, PhD thesis, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Doctorate in History of Medieval, Modern and Contemporary Art in Sicily, XXIV cycle, academic year 2012–2013, esp. pp. 6–29, 223–228, online: www.iris.unipa.it.
Donato Maria Pia, ‘La morte repentina, tra dubbi diagnostici e speranze di rianimazione (secc. XVII–XVIII)’, in Storia della definizione di morte, Francesco Paolo de Ceglia (ed.), Milan 2014, pp. 199–214.
Bresadola Marco and Capitani Silvano, ‘La ceroplastica anatomica del Settecento. Racconto di una mostra’, in I castelli di Yale online, V, 2017, 2, pp. 399–407, online: www.cyonline.unife.it.
di Sangro Raimondo, La materia del fuoco. Lettere a Giraldi e Nollet, Dissertation, introduction, notes and appendix, Leen Spruit (ed.), Naples 2018, esp. p. 32.
DOI: 10.82049/CATALOGO29