Anatomical Illustrations in the Renaissance

The representation on the main page of the History 304 web site, a skeleton mourning by a tomb, is from Andreas Vesalius's famous anatomy text of 1543, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem. Vesalius's drawings were done by Jan Stephan van Calcar, a portraitist associated with the studio of Titian.

The illustration on the title page of Vesalius's work, shown here, is a dramatic proclamation about the new way of teaching and demonstrating anatomy that Vesalius thought he was introducing. In contrast to medieval representations of anatomy demonstrations, where the professor sat upon a chair above the cadaver and read the anatomy text while a surgeon dissected the body, Vesalius has descended from the professorial chair and is actively engaged in the demonstration. Amidst a gaggle of students, professors, and onlookers, his hand bloodied by his cadaver (in this case, a female), the setting itself is grandiose. The picture is almost a call to arms defiantly announcing the end to the old way of doing anatomy and the beginning of a new way.

Vesalius's De fabrica was printed in Basel by Johannes Oporinus.

A Medieval Post-Mortem Examination

Post-mortem examinations were rare in the Middle Ages, in part due to religious and intellectual scruples. This early representation (c. 1300) of a dissection shows a surgeon and a monk.

An Early Renaissance Anatomy Scene

This illustration of a medical school dissection scene is from the Fasciculo di medicina (1493), a compendium of medieval anatomical works edited by Johannes Ketham. Included in this edition was a new translation of Mondino de' Luzzi's Anathomia, a work that is generally considered to be the best medieval work on anatomy.

This scene has often been read as supporting Vesalius's description of the anatomy professors who read from their classical texts "like jackdaws aloft in their high chairs, with egregious arrogance croaking things they have never investigated," while ignorant dissectors cut up the cadaver without any knowledge of the anatomy of the body. Yet in this scene the dissector works under the watchful eye of the physician, who stand behind him with his hand on the dissector's shoulder.

Mondino de' Luzzi, a professor of anatomy at Bologna, was considered by contemporaries to be the leading authority on anatomy until Vesalius. His work was the standard text on anatomy, one that Vesalius himself used.

This page is still under construction. Stay tuned for more bodies!