Ercole Lelli Ercole Lelli Ercole Lelli (14 September 1702 – 7 March 1766) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque, active mainly in Northern Italy, including his native city of Bologna, as well as Padua and Piacenza. Lelli was a pupil of the painter Giovanni Pietro Zanotti, but he also gravitated towards sculptural work. He excelled in the study of the anatomy of the human body as well as painting. Starting in 1742 he helped prepare artistic anatomical wax displays at the University of Bologna. The wax modeler and anatomist Giovanni Manzolini worked as his assistant from 1743. Manzolini resigned in late
Anatomical Theatre of Padua anatomical demonstrations, only in the late sixteenth century he was formally charged with the teaching of Anatomy. In 1404, during his stay in Vienna, Galeazzo di Santa Sofia undertook the first solemn public dissection, a practice he had obviously first seen and carried out in Padua. Moritz Roth, the great Vesalius Scholar, observes: The turning point would have happened thanks to the contribution of Alessandro Benedetti, an Italian anatomist: in 1514, "Anatomice sive historia corporis humani", the main of his works, was reprinted in Paris. This allowed the spread of his directives for the construction and the organization of a