An historical case study of the production and uses of anatomical models in late eighteenth-century Florence and Vienna. The project is aimed at understanding the ambivalent notion of the model as both descriptive and prescriptive, its role for the emergence of modem science and for the relationship between science and the state. The two main foci are the interplay between conceptual developments and social dynamics regarding the problem of representation within the Florentine model workshop and its surrounding museum, and the image of the human subject in enlightened absolutism conveyed in the artificial anatomies to model users both in the Florence museum and a Vienna military training hospital.