Human Anatomy: Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today
by Benjamin A Rifkin, Michael J Ackerman and Judith Folkenberg
352pp, Thames & Hudson, £17.95
Let's start with a warning. This mesmeric book contains images so bizarre and macabre that even the bravest reader may soon feel enmeshed in a grotesque nightmare. But they are the product, paradoxically, of an enlightened impulse: the urge to discover the truth about human bodies. Before the 15th century, only the haziest ideas about our anatomy prevailed. Then, quite suddenly, artists began to probe. By dissecting cadavers, they unearthed a wealth of revelatory information about the complex structures hidden beneath our skin.
It was an alarming enterprise. Hitherto unimagined sights were disclosed, and human vulnerability revealed at every turn. At the beginning of this book, Benjamin A Rifkin declares that "the body was never a free gift; it gives temporary shelter to our aspirations on a finite lease". Rifkin is an old-master dealer in New York, yet he sounds at times like a doom-filled preacher.
Not that Leonardo da Vinci, for one, regarded anatomical research as a moral quest. His drawings were an absolute breakthrough in our bodily understanding. Ignoring the widespread fear of hospitals, he pursued his researches among patients he encountered in the wards. At the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, he talked to a patient who had lived for a hundred years and watched him die. "I made an anatomy to see the cause of a death so sweet," wrote Leonardo around 1507. He had probably dissected other corpses before then. But it was a highly controversial activity. A few years later, when Leonardo was in Rome, a hostile observer "hindered me in anatomy, denouncing it before the Pope".
On his outstanding sheet of studies of a foetus in the womb, some notes and sketches dating from Leonardo's Roman period claim that the foetus possessed no soul of its own, independent of its mother: "the same soul governs these two bodies." The idea that the unborn child of a dead woman had no soul to save would have been wholly unacceptable to the church in Rome. At times, Leonardo seems to have kept corpses in his own studio, and once confessed to a "fear of living at night-time in the company of these dead men, dismembered and flayed and terrible to behold".
By the late 1480s his incessant drawings of body parts and skulls led him to plan a full-scale treatise on the subject. Like so many of his prodigious projects, the plan was never realised, and Leonardo's failure to produce his book meant that other publishers made fortunes from far less impressive ventures, such as a 1492 Venetian production called The Medical Gathering, witheringly described by Rifkin as "a ragbag of old tracts on midwifery, bloodletting and urinoscopy". But the shortcomings of the text soon became irrelevant. Artists, surgeons and the newly literate nobility rushed to acquire the book, which went through 12 versions in the following decade.
The runaway success of this treatise seems strange when its rather bland images are compared with the accelerating drama of its successors. In 1523, Jacopo Berengario da Carpi produced a volume filled with crudely drawn yet arresting woodcuts. An avid collector of everything from Roman sculpture to Raphael's paintings, this highly intelligent son of a surgeon knew how to startle. One print shows a corpse as a sun-god, revealing his muscles in deep dissection as he gives off an explosion of light. Even more weird is the cadaver who rips his chest open to expose his internal organs. Only 20 years later, Andreas Vesalius superseded all previous anatomical art by publishing his masterpiece, The Fabric of the Human Body. A Flemish professor of anatomy at Padua University, he provided sketches for Jan Stefan van Kalkar to turn into hugely skilful images. The outcome, still in print today, enthrals us with its illustrations of skeletons in distress. Far from wielding destruction in a medieval dance of death, they mourn their own extinction and lean with anguish on gravediggers' spades. However informative they were as records of Vesalius's own dissections, their mortal plight turns them into tragic victims.
No wonder these images were permeated with an air of melancholy. Punishment for illegal dissection could be "swift and savage", and the stench of swiftly decomposing corpses was often unbearable. Vesalius's career in Spain as physician to Philip II was sabotaged by jealous local doctors. Undeterred, he even used paste-on flaps in his Epitome, enabling readers to cut out body parts and apply them to handsomely formed nudes. As the sheets are stuck on, the figures lose their skin, muscles and everything except bones. The remaining skeleton clutches a skull in a gesture of sorrowful Vanitas, anticipating Hamlet as he laments the fate of Yorick the jester.
From then onwards, no limits could be set on a corpse's unnerving ability to dramatise death. In Juan Valverde de Amusco's Anatomy of the Human Body (1560), a flayed man clasps a dagger in one hand and, in the other, holds his own skin dangling down in a cascade of folds. It surely pays homage to Michelangelo's infamous loose-skin self-portrait in the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment. Like Leonardo before him, Michelangelo had once planned an anatomy book. Even he, though, would not have wanted to rival the repellent inventiveness of a 1627 book by Giulio Cesare Casseri and Adriaan van den Spieghel. They showed a pair of truncated legs walking jauntily along, with thighs pared down to muscle while the base of a spinal column juts alarmingly within the pelvis.
However distracting such images may seem to medical students today, our 21st-century world of digital imaging owes an immense debt to all these idiosyncratic artists. In the final chapter of this illuminating book, Michael J Ackerman describes how the invention of the CT and MRI scanners revolutionised anatomical images by introducing the missing third dimension - a major US government initiative called the Visible Human Project, which aims to "combine the realism and analytical skills of the great anatomical artists of the past with modern three-dimensional display technology provided by the CT and MRI".
The results are best viewed with the computer, and yet artists are still needed to simplify complex detail. Ackerman concludes that their "interpretive and innovative renderings" remain indispensable in the continuing attempt to "make human anatomy comprehensible." Leonardo, who did so much to kick-start the whole fascinating project, would surely have agreed.
· Four paperbacks of Richard Cork's writings on modern art are published by Yale