Art and science were allied more closely in the Renaissance than during any other period in the history of man. Although this is commonly acknowledged for the study of human anatomy, it was equally true for many other fields including botany, zoology, engineering, the applied sciences, and even architecture.

During the earlier medieval period, supreme interest had been shown in a distant and at times vengeful God, whose goals and means of achieving them were often thought to be beyond the ken of man. Theology was therefore granted first rank within a heavily systematized hierarchy of scholarly endeavors, and belief and reason were thought to be mutually exclusive. Absolutes in all fields of human endeavor, from morality to economics, controlled the intellectual, social, and artistic life of man. Scholasticism was the natural result of this antiexperimental approach in which observed data were to be made consistent with previously assumed truths.

In contrast to this static view of reality in the Middle Ages, the quality most characteristic of the Renaissance was its dynamic versatility. The prospects of an otherworldly paradise beyond the grave—at best an uncertainty—paled before the new attractions of the natural world. Inevitably as absolutes lost favor particulars increasingly drew men away from a God in distant heaven toward themselves and the immediate environment.

During the Renaissance, the highest authority became the natural world itself, and even the writings of the ancient authorities were subject to independent verification; the experimental method had begun to take hold. When the early experimentalist-observer wanted to convey his findings to others, he found the older modalities of expression inadequate. Rather than utilizing observations to "prove" the validity of an assumed truth, he attempted through a close study of many independent events to determine generally applicable principles—a method we call empiricism. However, when the experimentalist acknowledged a lack of understanding of his observations, verbal description was often difficult and a pictorial account was the most expedient form of communication.

Anatomical Illustration

Five hundred years before Christ, human anatomy as a science was begun in southern Italy by Alcmaeon of Crotona, who performed dissections upon animals. Shortly thereafter a practical text from the Hippocratic School described the anatomy of the shoulder as if it had been learned through dissection. Aristotle alluded to anatomical illustration when he referred to paradigmata, which were most probably figures made following animal dissection. In the third century before Christ, the study of anatomy was advanced considerably at Alexandria, where many discoveries can be attributed to Herophilus and Erasistratus, who were the first to perform human dissections systematically. After 150 B.C., human dissection was again prohibited for religious and ethical reasons, a prohibition strongly enforced by Rome. The science of human anatomy, however, persisted in the Hellenistic world, although only animal dissections were acknowledged. In the second century A.D., Galen achieved the highest level of success in the utilization of animal dissection (mostly of Barbary apes and pigs) and its generally correct application to human anatomy; however, some errors were inevitable due to an inability to confirm findings on human cadavers. Galen also developed the doctrine of "final cause," a teleological system which required that all findings must be consistent with physiology as he understood it.

Although no specific examples of anatomic illustrations from the Classical period have survived, the medieval "five-figure series" of bones, veins, arteries, internal organs, and nerves were probably copies of earlier drawings. Invariably the figures were depicted in a froglike squatting position to demonstrate the various systems, and occasionally a sixth figure was added: either a pregnant woman or the male and/or female generative organs. In ancient bas-reliefs, cameos, and bronzes there often appeared figurations of skeletons and shriveled bodies covered with skin (called lemures), but these were emblematic rather than schematic and had no instructional purpose.

The study of human anatomy seems to have been recommenced more for practical than intellectual reasons. War was no longer strictly a local affair, and it was desirable to have the means of repatriating the bodies of those who had been slain. Embalming was sufficient for short journeys, but the greater distances common in the Crusades called for the custom of the "boiling of bones." The papal bull De sepulturis of Boniface VIII (1300), though often incorrectly thought to forbid human dissection, was intended solely to stop this practice. The greatest impetus to dissection of human cadavers was the desire to learn the cause of death for essentially medicolegal reasons, to ascertain what killed an important personage or to learn about the plague and other infectious diseases. The verb "anatomize" was also used to describe the increasingly frequent Caesarean section.

The manuscript tradition in the medieval period did not rely upon the natural world for reference. Rather, earlier illustrations were accepted and copied. In general, the ability of copyists was limited, and, not having examined the natural object, they often introduced errors of understanding as well as of technique. Things were often "seen" as they were thought to occur by the ancients, and realistic illustrations would have been considered an incorrect short-circuiting of the proper method of study. Anatomy was also not considered a separate discipline but, rather, an adjunct to surgery, which in that day was relatively crude and principally demanded a knowledge of the appropriate sites for bloodletting. So long as anatomy retained this antipractical quality, nonrealistic and schematic figures were sufficient.

The first book printed from type and illustrated with printed rather than painted pictures seems to have been Ulrich Boner's Der Edelstein, printed by Albrecht Pfister at Bamberg after 1460, but the illustrations were little more than coarse decorations. In 1475, Konrad Megenberg issued his Buch der Natur, which contained several woodcuts representing fish, birds, animals, and various plants. These figures, as well as many others from nature books and encyclopedias of that period, were well within the manuscript tradition and hardly recognizable.

Although many elements contributed to the development of technical illustration early in the sixteenth century, two factors seem to have been paramount. The first was the end of the manuscript tradition of copying earlier drawings and the institution of nature as the primary model. A conviction had developed that the most appropriate concern for man was the natural world and not the hereafter. The Scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas had inadvertently prepared for this development through its separation of natural and supernatural worlds, even though theology had remained supreme over natural science.

The second major factor influential in the development of scientific illustrations for teaching was the slow realization of the advantages inherent in the medium. Initially publishers had thought only in terms of quantity, that with the printing press large numbers of reproductions could be easily and cheaply produced. Only later did they recognize the significance of each illustration's being identical to the original. The ability to reproduce exactly similar pictorial representations of things observed became the hallmark of the various scientific disciplines as they discarded their former reliance upon tradition and accepted a descriptive and, later, an experimental methodology. Verification of empirical observation now became easier.

The first examples of printed anatomical illustrations remained in the medieval manuscript tradition. The Fasciculus medicinae was a collection of contemporary writings for practicing physicians that went through many editions. In the first edition (1491), the woodcut was first utilized for an anatomical figure. The illustrations contained large figures showing the location of appropriate bloodletting sites, and lines ran out to printed explanations at the margins. The dissections were primitively and nonrealistically drawn. In the second edition (1493), the poses of the figures were more natural. In one scene a sick person was attended by his physician and several women. Another showed a dissection with the young, beardless professor sitting in the lecturer's chair while a barber surgeon dissected. The several texts of Hieronymus Brunschwig (c. 1450-1512) continued the use of narrative illustration. The final chapter of a work by Johannes Peyligk (1474-1522) was a brief anatomy of the entire body, but the eleven woodcuts included were little more than diagrammatic representations after the Arabists. In one, the intestines were cleverly but unrealistically represented as an interlaced love knot. In the Margarita philosophica by Gregor Reisch (1467-1525), an encyclopedia of all the sciences, several innovations were added to otherwise traditional woodcuts: the abdominal viscera were this time realistically represented.

In addition to those anatomical texts designed specifically for students and physicians, there were many separate printed sheets of anatomical figures captioned not in Latin (as were all works for physicians) but, rather, in the vernacular. There often was an intense interest in conception and the formation of the human fetus. The frequent use of the phrase "Know thyself" bespoke a philosophical and essentially nonmedical orientation. The Helain skeleton (Nuremberg, 1493) was the first example printed, and others quickly followed, but compared to renderings of many contemporary and even earlier artists it is inferior both anatomically and artistically. The "Dance of Death" had become an extremely popular subject, especially in the German-speaking countries after the Black Death, and, surprisingly, the artists' representations of skeletons and human anatomy were better than that of the anatomists.

The Renaissance artist of the fifteenth century became increasingly interested in the human form, and the study of human anatomy appropriately became a necessary part of the young artist's apprenticeship, especially in northern Italy. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), however, was the first artist to consider anatomy for reasons beyond its practicality in depicting the human form. Leonardo himself made anatomical preparations from which he produced drawings, of which more than 750 are extant, representing the skeletal, muscular, nervous, and vascular systems. The illustrations were often supplemented with annotations of a physiological nature. Leonardo's scientific accuracy was greater than that of Vesalius, and his artistic beauty remains unchallenged. His correct assessment of the curvature of the spine went otherwise undiscovered for more than a hundred years. He depicted the true position of the fetus in utero and first noted certain anatomical structures. The sketches were seen by only a few contemporaries and were not published until the end of the last century.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) spent at least twelve years in serious pursuit of anatomical knowledge through personal dissection, especially at the Cloister of Santo Spirito in Florence. He later described his transition from an awareness of the usefulness to the artist of anatomy to an interest of and for itself, although this interest was always secondary to art.

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) wrote treatises on mathematics, chemistry, hydraulics, and anatomy. His treatise on human proportions was published after his death, but his concern for anatomy was entirely esthetic, deriving ultimately from an interest in classical canons by which beauty might be defined. With the important exception of Leonardo, whose drawings were almost certainly not available to the anatomists of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance artist was only secondarily an anatomist. Although important contributions to the realistic representation of the human form were made (such as the use of perspective and shading to suggest depth and three-dimensionality), true scientific advances awaited the collaboration of the professional anatomist and artist.

Once anatomists became aware of realistic representations of precise anatomical information, a period of intense experimentation began throughout Europe but especially in northern Italy and southern Germany. This is best represented in Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (d. 1530), author of Commentaria super anatomica mundini (1521), who presented the first anatomical illustrations made consistently from nature. In 1536, Cratander at Basel published an edition of the works of Galen which included figures, especially of osteology, rendered in a remarkably realistic fashion. As early as 1532 and through the next several years, Charles Estienne of Paris was preparing a work which stressed a complete pictorial account of the human body.

Vesalius

One of the earliest and most successful solutions to reproducing exactly similar pictorial representations is to be found in the development of the illustrations published in the anatomical treatises of Andreas Vesalius (1514-64), culminating in his De humani corporis fabrica of 1543, one of the greatest books in the history of man. Vesalius had been born in 1514 in Brussels to a family with long-standing connections to the House of Burgundy and the Holy Roman emperor's court. His early medical training at the University of Paris (where his teachers included Jacques duBois and Guinter of Andernach) was interrupted by war between France and the Holy Roman Empire. Vesalius completed his studies at the renowned medical school of Padua in northern Italy. Immediately after graduation, he began teaching surgery and anatomy. After several preliminary works, in 1543, at the age of twenty-eight, he published his opus magnum which revolutionized not only anatomy but also scientific teaching in general. The Fabrica's illustrations work precisely because of their close integration with the text. They were meant to fulfill needs which the text could handle only with difficulty, if at all. The scheme of organization used by Mondino, whereby those parts which decomposed most rapidly were discussed first, was abandoned, and each of the major systems (bones, muscles, blood vessels, nerves, and internal organs) was discussed and depicted separately. The various parts of each organ system were considered both together and isolated, and the relationships of all these structures were also considered. Vesalius recognized that all structures are not identical in all individuals.

Vesalius wrote of his surprise at finding numerous errors in the works of Galen, and much has been made of his refusal to accept something on faith solely because it was found in Galen. Though Vesalius could not confirm Galen's holes between the chambers of the heart, he nevertheless remained a genuine follower of Galenic physiology. Their differences in anatomical understanding have been magnified, not the least by Vesalius himself. Perhaps recognizing that a little controversy can go a long way toward gaining attention, Vesalius soon found himself in bitter controversy with his former teacher Jacques duBois (or Sylvius in the Latinized form). Sylvius was a complete Galenist whose only retort upon learning of the differences between certain structures as seen by Vesalius and as described by Galen was that mankind must have changed in the intervening twelve hundred years.

Although Vesalius attributed the artwork for three earlier figures to a fellow Fleming, in the Fabrica he gave no credit to any artist, and much controversy has arisen over the identity of the artist or artists. Much of this controversy has been accentuated by the question of who was more important, artist or anatomist. Even the brief discussion above should make it obvious that the illustrations were significant precisely because they were a combination of art and science, a collaboration between artist and anatomist. Too much anatomical information, especially of an innovative variety, was included for Vesalius not to have been involved in the preparation of the drawings. But it is equally obvious that the degree of artistic sophistication and the knowledge of techniques new even to artists in the Renaissance were too great for Vesalius to have been the sole person responsible. Whether Jan Stephan van Calcar (1499-1546/50), who had done the earlier figures and worked in the studio of Titian in nearby Venice, was the artist, however, remains controversial and speculative. Nevertheless, a solution to the quest for the means of an adequate pictorial expression of natural phenomena had been found.

Botanical Illustrations

Similar transitions from schematic medieval manuscript illustrations to realistic and easily reproduced renderings occurred in other disciplines of the natural and applied sciences. Of them only botany seems relevant to medicine in the Renaissance because of the heavy reliance of pharmacology on herbals and medications derived from plants. The medieval manuscript illustration of a plant, like that of an anatomical part, almost always had an earlier illustration as its model instead of the plant. Repeated copyings tended to simplify the drawing, and a kind of abstraction developed which was accentuated by the earlier tradition of using floral and animal motifs as manuscript decorations. Furthermore, the medieval propensity toward the exotic made it difficult to determine the truthfulness of an object pictured; for instance, in zoology the rich legends of the unicorn made it seem much more likely that it would be real than the giraffe or rhinoceros. The first published nature-books and encyclopedias contained illustrations quite similar to other drawings made at the same time: simplified, abstract, and having little resemblance to the natural object. The Hortus Sanitatis (1491) contained many colored woodcuts of real and fanciful plants and animals, but it was with Otto Brunfels (1488?-1534) of Mainz that we see the beginning of the transition from medieval to modern. His Herbarum vivae eicones (Strassburg, 1530-32) contained many illustrations of plants executed by Hans Weiditz although the textual description made no attempt at originality over Pliny and Dioscorides. Plant description really took its first start (after Theophrastus) with Hieronymus Bock, or Tragus, (1489?-1554) who wrote down numerous descriptions of plants in the vernacular in his Krautterbuch (1539). Needless to say, a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, or by many other artists, made decades earlier, possessed greater esthetic beauty and scientific accuracy than any of these primitive illustrations. Only with the publication in 1542 of the great De historia stirpium of the Bavarian Leonhard Fuchs (1501-66) do we find in botany a quality of rendering equivalent to that found in the Fabrica, and numerous reprints were to follow.

Once the works of Vesalius and Fuchs had been completed, much of the stimulus for development in the fields of anatomy and botany was lost, for so long as these disciplines were to remain descriptive, or empiric, there was little to do beyond adding detail. Thus, the works of Bartolommeo Eustachio (1524?-74), Matteo Realdo Colombo (1515?-59), Giovanni Battista Canano (1515-79), Gabriello Fallopio (1523-62), and Fabricius ab Aquapendente (1537-1619) in anatomy and Conrad Gesner (1516-65), Gaspard Bauhin (1550-1624), and Pierre Belon (1517-64) in botany seem inspired. Only when William Harvey (1578-1657) discerns the circulation of the blood from the discovery of the venous valves by his teacher Fabricius ab Aquapendente do we find an innovative use of empiricism, for which a long period of classifying was necessary before experimentation could proceed on strong footing.

Albert S. Lyons

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