Let’s begin by stating the obvious: We think of ourselves as anatomical beings. Anatomy is our inner reality: Anatomy is us. In greater or lesser detail we all carry around with us an anatomical image of self — even if we haven’t formally studied anatomy — a pocket map that divides us into regions and terrains, with internal place names and borders. And this anatomical self-image has a history — which is the history of anatomical representation — a long history of collaboration and negotiation between anatomists, artists, engravers, patrons, printers, and readers. Until the invention of the X ray, sonograms, MRIs and the like, the only way to see into ourselves was through the dissection of dead human beings. The dissected cadaver was our mirror.
Early modern anatomists peered into that mirror—and made faces. A spirit of play pervaded the anatomy of Vesalius and his predecessors and successors. They earnestly investigated our structure and functions, tried to accurately describe and represent the body, but they also sought to amuse and entertain and morally instruct and amaze students and colleagues and patrons and
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each other, in a captivating charming sort of way. They were a feisty bunch, constantly challenging and abusing each other, trying to outdo each other with flashier dissections and bigger and more expensive books, filled with more beautiful and artful and witty and outrageous illustrations of cadavers in silly or provocative poses. Anatomists were performers, showmen, when they did their dissections and delivered their lectures in the pit of the anatomical theater, for audiences that included the local aristocracy, magistrates, and the clergy, and their showmanship carried over to their illustrated publications, and to their museums and specimens.
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Fig. 2. Pietro [Berrettini] da Cortona (artist, 1596-1669), Luca Ciamberlano (engraver?, c.1580-1641), Tabulae anatomicae... (Rome, 1741), pl. 16. Copperplate engraving, National Library of Medicine. This extravagant plate, an early work by baroque artist-architect Pietro da Cortona, shows a dissected man holding up an anatomical mirror. The floating heads are copied from Vesalius’s 1543 De Human Corporis Fabrica.
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