Anatomy
Related: biology - human body - visceral
Related by word in title: Anatomy of Hell (2004) - Chaterine Breillat
The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy (1998) - Deanna Petherbridge, Ludmilla Jordanova [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
cover illustration by Jacques Fabian Gautier d'Agoty
Anatomical drawing by Jacques Fabian Gautier d'Agoty (1717-1785)
Vesalius, De Humani Corporus fabrica (1543)
Fabrica (1543) - Vesalius
Challenging Galenism
At age 25, Vesalius launched a full assault on Galen. Lecturing at Padua and then at Bologna, he rigged up skeletons of humans and of Barbary macaques, and showed the assembled students how wrong Galen had been. Vesalius then set out to put together a new anatomy book that included his discoveries. Over the next four years Vesalius worked with the finest block cutters of Venice and draftsmen from Titian’s workshop. He named his book De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, or “The Seven Books on the Structure of the Human Body”-commonly known as the Fabrica. In this 1543 masterwork, men and women now stood stripped of skin and Skeletons leaned lazily against columns in the rolling Italian countryside.
Humans Are Not so Unique
Fabrica launched a new tradition in anatomy in Europe, in which anatomists trusted only their own observations and explored the body like a new continent. Vesalius’ discovery of the important differences between species also helped usher in the science of comparative anatomy, in which researchers studied animals to find their similarities and differences. In the process, they gradually began to recognize humans as being one species among many, with a few unique traits but many others shared in common with other animals. Some 300 years after Vesalius first shook off the blind obedience to Galen, Darwin used that vast stock of anatomical knowledge to build his theory of evolution. --http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/history/compar_anat2.shtml [Feb 2005]
Vesalius, De Humani Corporus fabrica (1543) - Vesalius
The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy (1998) - Deanna Petherbridge, Ludmilla Jordanova
The human body has long been central to Western art, and in order to represent the body in all its manifestations many artists have studied anatomy: dissecting the dead to better depict the living. The Quick and the Dead focuses on a range of artists, among them Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Albrecht Drer, William Hogarth, George Stubbs, Thodore Gricault, Kiki Smith, Joel-Peter Witkin, and Cindy Sherman to show the great richness and complexity that can result when art and science intersect. The drawings, prints, photographs, and objects in this book span five centuries and mark numerous cultural shifts, yet their imagery is as powerful today as when it was created. Bodily representation has shadowed Western art since the High Renaissance, particularly in the form of atlases of anatomical prints, detailed drawings, and wax cadavers used for teaching purposes. Studying anatomy was deemed so essential that it was part of the instruction program in the earliest Italian academies. Now contemporary artists interested in cultural constuctions of the body are reinvigorating the subject, with the fragmentation of human form being a prime concern. Since 1858, Gray's Anatomy has served to legitimize notions of "serious" science unchallenged by the frivolity of art. But in recent years a kind of rapprochement between medical history and cultural theory has occurred, and new medical technologies have become a wellspring for artists as well as for doctors. As The Quick and the Dead makes clear, the human bodysymbolic and intimate, material and sacredis a vital cultural resource and a site where various social constituencies find relevant meaning. -- from the publisher
Dream anatomy
Anatomie des parties de la génértion de l’homme et de la femme
Paris, 1773. Colored mezzotint. National Library of Medicine
Jacques Fabien Gautier D’Agoty (1717-1785)
[author/artist/printer]
image sourced here.
Gautier D’Agoty’s colored mezzotints have a painterly quality. This pregnant woman calmly looks back at the viewer, a characteristic pose of 18th-century French portraiture.
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