The so-called Mediceishce Venus is one of a collection of life-size anatomical wax models from the late eighteenth century. Designed and used for teaching, she was created and is still kept at Museo La Specola in Florence.

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In the patient, quiet museum, she is exhibited
closed, indehiscent inside a glass casket,

reclining on her back, on hair long as her spine.
Her face is sublime as in the moment

before sleep, or after waking, eyes opening
or just closing, mouth barely parted as though

to draw a breath or speak, fine teeth suggested
behind the lasting red of her lips. A strand

of pearls encircles, defines her nakedness—
a luminescent sheen of shoulders, breasts,

and thighs—such wholeness a molded disremembrance
of what it took to make her, the wax itself

long removed from the hive’s hexagonal prisms,
the cooling fan of temporal wings.