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An exhibition organized by the National Academy of Sciences
Visionary Anatomies and the Great Divide
Art, Science, and the Changing Conventions of Anatomical Representation , 1500-2003
- Michael Sappol,
Curator-Historian, National Library of Medicine
(from the exhibition catalogue, available for download for free)
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This essay is about a set of longstanding issues in the history of anatomical representation. It is about the conventions that govern the collaboration between artists and anatomists, the setting of boundaries between art and anatomical science, the dialogue (or lack thereof) between artist and anatomist. And it is about how such matters affect, and even shape, our own conceptions of self, our own ideas about what it means to be a person, our own ideas about who and what we are. The illustrated anatomical treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries featured a rich ensemble of imaginary figurations and artistic embellishments, with much morbid humor, and much literary and religious allusion. [1: Remmelin] Sometime between then and now, something happened to anatomy. Nowadays scientific anatomies stick to a straight and narrow path: they don’t allow for any deviations, any correspondences between the anatomical body and the moral, cultural world. They don’t allow for any fun, don’t permit, or acknowledge, the pleasures of anatomy.
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Fig. 1. Johann Remmelin (anatomist, 1583-1632), Lucas Kilian (engraver, 1579-1637), Visio secondo tou kataptrou mikrokosmikou…(Augsburg?, 1613). Layered copperplate engraving, National Library of Medicine. An anatomical Eve, surrounded by floating body parts, stands with one foot on a skull. Through an aperture in the base of the skull, the serpent appears to reach toward an apple. Between Eve’s legs, a plume of smoke rises from a volcanic phoenix nest to obscure her genitalia. The flaps of the plate can be opened up to reveal Eve’s innards.
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© 2004 Michael Sappol
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