The cutting edge

THE year 1543 is notable in the history of science as the date of publication of Copernicus's treatise De Revolutionibus.

The anatomy lesson

THE year 1543 is notable in the history of science as the date of publication of Copernicus's treatise De Revolutionibus, which postulated a heliocentric model of the universe.

 But dates can be misleading in the history of ideas, for it was not until the early 17th century that this theory became a subject of bitter controversy in the lifetime of Galileo.

Almost as significant, and certainly of more immediate impact, was the other great scientific publication of 1543, Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the first important illustrated atlas of human anatomy, although not the first scholarly work on the subject.

Most of the structure of the human body and much of its physiology had been studied by ancient medical writers, summed up in the massive corpus of texts by Galen, who lived in the second century AD and who learned much in youth working with gladiators before ending his career as physician to several emperors.

Throughout the Middle Ages, although Galen's texts were republished, the original diagrams they would have included - there are drawings in Arabic and Persian manuscripts that may derive from these ancient illustrations - were lost, so that even when medieval universities taught anatomy, they had to rely on words without pictures. Contrary to what is often imagined, medieval universities did carry out dissections, but the professor rarely got close enough to the cadaver to verify or correct Galen's description; an unfortunate technical assistant did the messy work while the lecturer sat at a safe distance reading his textbook.

The real pioneers in this field were the artists of the Renaissance, and in particular Leonardo and Michelangelo, who both cut up bodies to find out how they worked, and made the extraordinary drawings that we still wonder at today. Leonardo in particular - and characteristically - went far beyond the practical requirements of artistic anatomy and carried out dissections of the inner organs, including the womb - there is a famous drawing of a foetus in utero - and the heart, making remarkably precise drawings of the system of valves between the arteries, veins and chambers of the heart. It is all the more surprising, when we consider what was known of the structure of the heart, that the circulation of the blood was not discovered for more than a century.

The lead in the field of anatomy passed back from artists to scientists with Vesalius, who was born in Brussels, became professor at the famous medical school at the University of Padua, and began by publishing a modern edition of Galen's Institutiones Anatomicae (1539), before completing his own monumental work a few years later.

It is, incidentally, an index of how much was lost in the fall of the Roman Empire that it took 1300 years for European medical knowledge to equal and then surpass the standard achieved in the last golden age of antiquity.

Vesalius's work may well be said to have revolutionised the anatomy generally available in the 16th century, although he was indebted, as we have seen, to the example of the artists who had preceded him, particularly in regard to the principle and scope of visual illustration; and indeed the woodblocks for his book are believed to have been produced by artists from the studio of Titian in nearby Venice.

The story of art and its relation to anatomy in the early modern period has been retold recently in a slim but valuable publication, Domenico Laurenza's Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and based on its own extensive collection of prints and drawings.

More information about medical and anatomical textbooks of the Renaissance is contained in the outstanding Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge, originally published as the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Harvard Art Museum (Yale University Press, 2011).

Part of the same ground is covered in The Anatomy Lesson at the Ian Potter Museum - one of three simultaneous exhibitions to commemorate the sesquicentary of the University of Melbourne's school of medicine. The exhibition does not include a copy of Vesalius, unfortunately, but does have many other fascinating early modern publications, open to reveal illustrations that range from dissections of the eye to life-sized drawings of the foot or rib cage.

Most of these books are not intended primarily for artists. Much of Vesalius already goes well beyond the needs of painters and sculptors, and subsequent work in the field of anatomy tended to deal with inner organs and tissues that are not normally visible in a living body.

By the 17th and especially the 18th century, two kinds of anatomy book were published, one addressed to a medical audience and the other to artists and a public of connoisseurs interested in art and in the history of sculpture, for many illustrations in such volumes were drawn from ancient statues and, in a sense, allowed the viewer to understand their implicit mechanics.

Even among the books in the exhibition there are allusions to ancient art, as in a couple of early illustrations that take as their subject the theme of Heracles crushing the earth-born giant Antaeus in his arms. Most of the illustrations, however, are much more technical, and some of them could do with a bit more explanation than is provided, especially for viewers who cannot decipher the Latin text of the publications in which they appear. There is thus a diagram of an oesophagus that remains rather obscure, not to mention next to it a mysterious illustration of a little human figure sprouting twigs and leaves, in John Case's treatise De Venis (1696).

A reference to symphysiotomy as an alternative to caesarean section - proposed by Severin Pineau in 1597 - should be clarified: it entails, as the name makes clear, cutting the ligament (the symphysis pubis) in the middle of the pubic bone, which would allow the pelvic girdle to open and let the baby through. Still common in developing countries, the operation is otherwise rare today, though recently there has been a scandal about its frequency in post-war Ireland.

A whole wall is devoted to a set of prints from the 16th and 17th centuries collected in London in the 1920s, it seems, by Frederic Poynton, a physician like his son John Orde Poynton, who gave this fine collection of images and medical books to the University of Melbourne. These prints are collectively evidence of the profound and continuing interest in anatomy among artists and their public in the wake of the example of the high Renaissance masters and of the scientific work of Vesalius and his successors.

Indeed it would be interesting to try to tease out the different roles of these two influences, especially among the mannerist artists who were overawed by the achievement of Michelangelo.

But many of the individual engravings are also particularly interesting, such as Hendrik Goltzius's engraving after Cornelis van Haarlem's painting of two of Cadmus's followers devoured by the dragon, where the artist has deliberately contrived to juxtapose the upper part of one body and the lower part of the other in a kind of anatomical puzzle.

Melchior Meier's engraving of Apollo flaying Marsyas, the satyr who had unwisely challenged the god to a musical contest, is similarly a mannerist conceit, for a subject that was considered by earlier Renaissance thinkers as a spiritual allegory is here merely an excuse to represent an icorchi, a flayed figure of the type used in studios to teach anatomy to pupils. Apollo, who is after all the god of medicine and healing, is here transformed into a professor of anatomy.

Goltzius's engraving of the Roman hero Marcus Calpurnius Flamma displays a similar ambiguity in its subject matter: in principle, the powerful anatomical definition of the figure should serve to express the tribune's strength and moral resolve. In reality, one can't help feeling that the subject is little more than a pretext for a display of the artist's anatomical expertise; certainly, the perfect roundness of the gluteus maximus seems to interest him far more than the fate of the imperilled legions in the distance.

The continued pedagogical importance of anatomy is evident in Enea Vico's engraving of Baccio Bandinelli's academy, or studio, in which his pupils are at work drawing the antique while surrounded by skeletons and bones. Cornelis Cort's engraving after Jan van der Straet is something of an encyclopedic summation of a curriculum of studies in the visual arts: the scene is crowded with masters, pupils and practitioners, each at work on different tasks, and correspondingly labelled: anatomia, pictura, architectura, and so on. A point of interest is the clear distinction within the field of sculpture between statuaria as carving and sculptura as modelling.

From the early days of the National Gallery of Victoria school in Melbourne comes a series of life studies in various media, including drawings and oil sketches by talented students such as Charles Wheeler - a painting of a young man stripped to the waist and leaning backwards - and Hugh Ramsay, by whom there is a striking sheet of hands as well as a study of a girl's back that is almost minimalist in its lack of incident.

There is inevitably some disjunction between the early modern material, composed of books and prints, and the drawings and studies from a century ago, especially as the latter are only indirectly concerned with anatomy.

The gap could have been bridged by borrowing from the considerable collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, but evidently a decision was made to work with those of the various branches of the University of Melbourne.

This does have its own interest, especially in regard to the Orde Poynton material, but the coherence of the exhibition is more seriously strained by the inclusion of a number of pieces of recent and contemporary material.

The relevance of Juan Davila's painting is dubious, and both relevance and quality are questionable in the cases of Vivienne Shark LeWitt and Gordon Bennett; for all the ideological waffle in the catalogue about this last work, the fact remains that the idea is a direct repetition of the body prints or anthropometries of Yves Klein, which were already a gimmick 50 years ago.

The only contemporary pieces that make much sense in this context are the little anatomical sculptures by Ruth Hutchinson, which turn up in the cases displaying historical works, juxtaposed with scientific illustrations or in other cases displayed on their own. Unassuming but sophisticated, their fascination with anatomical structure and riddling play with illusion and paradox make them a natural partner to the scientific imagery of the early modern period and the mannerist engravings, poised between art and science, which compose the core of this exhibition.

Anatomy Lesson, Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne, to January 20