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An exhibition organized by the National Academy of Sciences
Visionary Anatomies and the Great Divide
Part Iv: Getting real: The new aesthetics of scientific illustration
(from the exhibition catalogue, available for download for free)
Then it all changed. Between 1680 and 1800, the conventions, meanings, audience, and uses of anatomical representation shifted. Anatomists began to develop new criteria for what constituted acceptable scientific illustration. Play and the pursuit of truth became incompatible. The cadaver was no longer made to pose and dance. The artist was no longer asked or permitted to embellish the background, to provide fantasy architecture and landscapes for the anatomical figures to frolic in. The reader was no longer asked to meditate on human mortality. The high spirits and intoxicated humor of anatomical representation were no longer wanted. The scrutiny of the structure of the body, in all its particularity and specificity, took up all of the representational space. Science, anatomists argued, needed to focus. Suddenly a boundary separated art and science—a rift that ran right through death and the dead body. Art and science came to be defined in mutually exclusive ways. That separation, with some important revisions, still has force today.
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The key text in the new anatomical realism was Govard Bidloo’s 1685 Anatomia humani corporis, with illustrations by artist Gerard de Lairesse. Although Bidloo included smirking skeletons holding hourglasses and fashionably modern but symbol-laden anatomical still lives, his anatomy also featured illustrations unlike any that had ever been done. Dissected bodies and body parts are rendered in harshly hyper-realistic detail. The viewer is spared nothing: we see the raggedness of the flesh and the prosthetics of dissection (pins, hoists, ropes, the dissecting table) and mutilated faces. The overall effect is beautiful, and ugly, and disturbing, a nightmare anatomy. Later on, William Hunter (with artist Jan van Riemsdyk) and Albrecht von Haller (with artist C. J. Rollinus) consolidated the new style and theorized it. They entirely excised death figures and symbols and grace notes. Like Bidloo, they concentrated on the particulars of a single, specific dissection of the body or body part—there are no composites, no artistic beautification or embellishment. The new anatomy had a relentless gaze that seemed almost to terrorize its subjects and its viewers.
This is not to say that art and aesthetics were completely expunged from anatomy, only a particular kind of art and aesthetics. Obviously, the artful representation of anatomical objects continued to be a crucial part of the science of anatomy, and anatomists continued to work with artists, and continued to value high artistry, but only of one type: the art of the real.
In the waning years of the eighteenth century, the Scottish anatomist John Bell discussed the change. Bell truculently denounced “the vitious practice of drawing from the imagination,” instead of “truly from the anatomical table.”
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Fig. 4. Govard Bidloo (anatomist, 1649-1713), Gérard de Lairesse (artist, 1640-1711), Ontleding des menschelyken lichaams... (Amsterdam, 1690), pl. 30. Copperplate engraving with etching, National Library of Medicine. This stark dissection—with ragged flesh fully displayed and hands bound with a cord—signals a commitment to a higher level of realism. There is no fantasy landscape; the scene is the dissecting room. To our eyes, the picture may suggest a distressing indifference to, or even pleasure in, human suffering.
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He hated anatomical figures formed from the imagination of the painter merely; sturdy and active figures, with a ludicrous contrast of furious countenances, and active limbs, combined with ragged muscles, and naked bones, and dissected bowels, which they are busily employed in supporting…or even demonstrating with their hands. His solution to the “continual struggle between the anatomist and the painter” was to get rid of the artist entirely and do his own (notably harsh) illustrations (which, to our eyes, have a naïve, gothic crudity). Bell’s colleagues didn’t follow his example: they ceded representation to artists, but took command of the reins. The artist lost creative control.
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The triumph of harsh anatomical realism was not, however, the end of history. In the late eighteenth century another anatomical style emerged that achieved even greater dominance: a universalist anatomy that featured composite, idealized, and often intensely colored, views of the body. In this genre, bodies and body parts float in air, free of all context: anatomy is cleansed of its association with death. The process of dissection is expunged; the prosthetics of dissection and the dissecting table are suppressed. Everything except the body is a distraction. Particularity is also an obstacle to the truth: a specific body always has pathologies and idiosyncrasies that obscure the “general” principles and characteristics of bodies, organs, and systems. Anatomical universalism was a style much in vogue in the nineteenth century, the style of Gray’s anatomy, and was featured in the most widely used twentieth century anatomies.
In both new styles of realism, iconographic, theatrical, and ornamental elements were purged. Science dealt with the real, with the truth of the body and of the physical universe. Art was given everything else: moral truth, history, aesthetics, embellishments, metaphor, myth. Outside of scientific illustration--in academic art, political cartooning, advertising art, horror films, and other productions of popular culture—imaginative, humorous, and moral representations of the anatomical body continued to be made and viewed.
© 2004 Michael Sappol
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