The study of the human body on display at Fondazione Prada Cere Anatomiche: La Specola di Firenze tells the story of the human body through its most faithful reproduction

Natura collecta, natura exhibita, and sometimes "natura restituta," recomposed, reconstructed, but never idealized as truth. Cere Anatomiche: La Specola di Firenze | David Cronenberg on view from March 24 to July 17, 2023, inside the exhibition casket of Fondazione Prada's Milan headquarters sheds light on our most intimate, concealed depths. An exhibition that is in itself a living image and metaphor for the act of investigating and delving, which in many cases we would more colloquially call evisceration. Although we are now far from the time of the haruspices, it is clear what star is guiding the cultural proposal of Fondazione Prada, perhaps today not far from the Enlightenment «making the vulgar happy by making them more cultured.»

Yet nonsense of sweet horror permeates from the highly prized display cases, intermittently lit by aseptic operating room lamps. There is something familiar, warm, and enveloping, that holds us back and invites us to search deeper to look more carefully, fearlessly at those waxen copies of copies of us, which already in Botticelli's features seem almost impossible, archetypal, and moment cease to frighten us and fascinate us like the didactic collections of seabirds and tortoises of curiosity cabinets. There is no mediation in the fruition of truth, which reveals itself raw and disconcerting and disarms us in form and volume. Anatomical Waxes guides us with invisible hands as a Socratic maieutic through the discovery of our most earthly features and reminds us how much we, despite everything, are also made of flesh.