The Art of the Model Maker
Models have long been used in biological and medical education. Some of them are not merely functional but are exquisite works of art in their own right. The University of Aberdeen Zoology Museum is fortunate in having in its collections models made by some of the greatest exponents of the art.
Louis Auzoux (1797-1880) was a French medical school graduate and was the pre-eminent maker of plaster and papier mâché models during the 19th century. He developed anatomically accurate models of body structures out of papier mâché, calling these mock-ups anatomy clastique (from the Greek word klastos, which means broken in pieces), because they could be taken apart and reassembled by the student.
In the 1880s father and son Leopold (1822-1895) and Rudolf Blaschka (1857-1939) ran a small glass workshop in Dresden, Germany. Their original business was making glass eyes but in 1863 they started to make exquisite glass models of marine invertebrates and flowers and these soon became their main business.
Robert and his son Reinhold Brendel produced beautiful and accurate models of enlarged flowers at Breslau and Berlin.
The French naturalist Emile Deyrolle sold collections of specimens for the amateur naturalist and a wide range of teaching models for primary and secondary education. He founded his shop in 1831 and moved to its current location on the Rue du Bac in Paris, the former home of Louis XIVs banker, in 1881.
Today, the tradition of model making still flourishes using modern synthetic materials such as the resin casts of the skulls of extinct sabrecats and other vertebrates by Bone Clones of California.
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