In 1978, the Munch scholar Robert Rosenblum suggested that the strange, sexless creature in the foreground of the painting was inspired by a Peruvian mummy, which Munch could have seen at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. This mummy, which was buried in a fetal position with its hands alongside its face, also struck the imagination of Munch's friend Paul Gauguin: it stood as a model for figures in more than twenty of Gauguin's paintings, among those the central figure in his painting "Human misery (Grape harvest at Arles)" and for the old woman at the left in his painting "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?". In 2004, an Italian anthropologist speculated that Munch might have seen a mummy in Florence's Museum of Natural History, which bears an even more striking resemblance to the painting. However, later studies have disputed the Italian theory, as Munch never visited Florence until after painting "The Scream".