What Antonio Vasari wrote on Anto nio del Pollaiolo's Ercole e Anteo (c. 1475), tempera on panel, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, bears witness to sweeping changes in the artistic representation of the human body at the end of the fifteenth century. This shift mainly concerned the image's construction, which was based not only on merely external observation, but also on the awareness of the internal organization of the body, which is made of muscles, along with specialized organs and bones. Starting with this crucial cultural moment, specifically from Masaccio's and Donatello's artistic experiences in representing the human body's internal systems, this essay diachronically examines the production of important wax modellers, active in the city of Bologna around the eighteenth century. A close look at some artists that worked for the ‘Accademia delle Scienze’, such as Ercole Lelli (1702–66), Giovanni Manzolini (1700–55) and Anna Morandi (1716–74), shows how this new approach to the study of the human body mutually affected both art and medicine, paving the way for a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of anatomic systems.