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An exhibition organized by the National Academy of Sciences
Visionary Anatomies and the Great Divide
Part Iii: Playing with death; fun with science
(from the exhibition catalogue, available for download for free)
The anatomical revolution associated with Vesalius produced knowledge about the body from the appropriation and study of the dead. Anatomy was a dark science. It acquired its mystique from its willful transgressions of funerary custom, its incursions across the boundary that separates life and death. Anatomists took, often stole, dead bodies and cut into them. Dissection became the preeminent ritual that inducted young men into the cult of medical knowledge. Medicine became something of a death cult.
Scientific anatomy, of course, was more than just dissection: it translated the observation of the body’s interior from the dissecting table to the pages of a book (and back again to the dissecting table). Representation was a key innovation of the new science of anatomy: ancient anatomical treatises consisted largely or entirely of written descriptions of the body; illustrations were rare. After Vesalius, the authoritative anatomical treatise had to be illustrated, had to have richly detailed and intensively captioned pictures of the dissected body and body parts. Given the complexity of the interior of the body, you couldn’t just describe it, you had to show it.
And what was shown was the dead body. Early modern representations of the anatomical body took death head on: the dead mocked the living; the living mocked the dead; the cadaver was an effigy. It served as a reminder of our mortality, our fallibility, our folly — the fragility of human life and civilization.
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Fig. 3. Andreas Vesalius (anatomist, 1514-1564), the workshop of Titian (artists), De Humani Corporis Fabrica... (Basel, 1543), pl. 190. Woodcut, National Library of Medicine. A dissected body is realistically displayed, hoisted by ropes. But even here, there are aesthetic elements—the figure is placed in a landscape. In the text, Vesalius notes that he has playfully attached the abdominal diaphragm to the wall with its own natural stickiness.
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Anatomy cited or parodied or augmented long-established iconic traditions and subjects — memento mori, danse macabre, Christian and classical martyrology — and newer genres such as still life, which often used human mortality as one of its tropes. Early modern anatomists made their work their pleasure and their pleasure their work. But it was morbid play, death play.
When Vesalius entered the scene, things got more serious. Vesalius took unprecedented care in getting it right. He wrote about the errors of Galen’s ways, but he also made sure to show them. The clincher was the illustrations. Some were done in a highly developed naturalistic manner: here is the real body, they seem to say. But others show nonexistent muscles to make the point that Galen mistakenly described nonexistent anatomical structures, or show a human skull atop a dog’s skull to signify that Galen erred because his knowledge of anatomy was obtained from dissection of dogs and other animals, not people. Neither Vesalius nor his artists could conceive of, or desire, a work governed entirely by austere naturalism. Quite the contrary, they wanted to entertain their readers and themselves. So when Vesalius entered the scene, things got more serious, but also wittier and more theatrical.
During the next century and a half, anatomy became even wittier, and sillier, and more theatrical. In this period, forms of theater, dance, and literature emerged that are recognizably modern: the ballet and opera, and all kinds of court entertainments. This was the era of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Moliere, Donne, Cervantes, and so on. It was a time in which great courts and salons and circles emerged, a time when people vied to outdo each other, with manners and repartee and fashion. And it was a time in which people began to perform, and develop, the idea of unique individuality and personality, what literary historian Stephen Greenblatt calls “Renaissance self-fashioning.”
In their dissections and written works, early modern anatomists fashioned themselves. In their book illustrations they modeled the fashioned self, in all its variety. In this cultural milieu, the producers and audience for anatomical representation expected, even demanded, that anatomical illustration represent the human body morally, socially, theologically, theatrically, balletically, literarily, as well as scientifically. Anatomists and their artists taught the moral and scientific truth of the human body, and fooled around for no reason other than to have fun. Early modern anatomical illustrations and objects operated in multiple dimensions of meaning and function. The anatomist studied dissected cadavers, and enjoyed manipulating and presenting them; readers and viewers studied dissected cadavers, and enjoyed looking. And this convergence of work and play, this multiplicity of function and meaning, was not problematic. (The only one not having fun was the anatomical subject, conscripted to serve as the raw material from which anatomical knowledge was produced, and denied funerary honor.)
© 2004 Michael Sappol
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