Gaetano Giulio Zumbo

show This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (April 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Gaetano Zumbo]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|fr|Gaetano Zumbo}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Wax statues depicting effects of the plague, La Specola, Florence

Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (1656–1701) was an Italian sculptor in wax or wax modeller of the Baroque era. His main talents are not those generally considered as an artistic, but would now be viewed as the creation of scientific models, but they were highly regarded as curiosity pieces in his time. He has also been called an anatomist.

He was born in Siracusa, Italy, and showed an entirely self-taught inclination to sculptural arts and anatomy. Not familiar with chiseling, he learned to model colored wax. This led to his patronage by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in Florence, for whom he created a series of five morbid models, almost a memento mori, depicting the progressive Corruption after death, beginning with a dying man, followed by a corpse, a corpse just starting to decompose, half corrupt, another completely corrupt, and finally eaten by worms. Once displayed in the Medici gallery, it was later transferred to the cabinet of natural history and zoological specimens (now displayed in the Section of the Natural History Museum called La Specola). Zumbo left Florence for Genoa. There he completed wax sculptures: a Nativity and a Deposition. He made a partnership with a French Surgeon called Desnoues, and with him completed a number of anatomic studies including a woman who died while in childbirth. With Denoues, he travelled to Paris, and there presented to the Academy of Sciences, a wax sculpture of the head with naturalistic depiction of veins, arteries, nerves, glands, and muscles.^[1]

Similar work by is in the Sansevero Chapel in Naples, Italy.

The central character of the novel Secrecy (2013) by Rupert Thomson, is based on Zumbo.^[2]

Sources[]

This article about an Italian sculptor is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by .

• v
• t