Drawing Comparisons: Images in Comparative Anatomy, 1500 – 1900

Bibliotheca Hertziana   // ⃒ Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions 

Session One: Drawing Order 

Martin Clayton

Royal Collection Trust, Windsor Castle

“‘Describe the jaw of a crocodile’: Leonardo da Vinci’s Animal Anatomies”

Leonardo’s anatomical work was the most accomplished of his many scientific studies. Like all his research, it combined traditional beliefs with acute direct observation, including the dissection of up to thirty human cadavers. But Leonardo also studied and dissected animals at many points of his career, especially during the periods of his most intense anatomical work, c.1485–90 and c.1506–13. His subjects included horses, bears, monkeys, frogs, dogs and oxen –– as surrogates for human material, as independent subjects of study, and on occasion as a means to compare explicitly human and animal anatomy. Though it is challenging to identify any overarching methodology in these studies, and even harder to detect any lasting ‘influence,’ this is typical of Leonardo’s scientific studies. The drawings and notes on animal anatomy can therefore be seen as a case study of his aims in anatomy and his scientific methods overall. 

Katrina van Grouw

University of Cambridge

“Linnaeus Organized: Illustrating Convergence in Comparative Anatomy”

Of all vertebrate groups, birds exhibit the highest degrees of both convergence (adaptation to shared ecological niches resulting in a similar appearance even in unrelated groups) and divergence (radical differences between closely related taxa). Only now in the twenty-first century is the complex branching of the avian phylogenetic tree at last becoming understood. Paradoxically, the preoccupation with expressing these true evolutionary relationships impedes opportunity for examination of functional anatomy, lacking an objective means of direct comparison between relevant taxa. This paper describes the compositional challenges inherent in producing a contemporary illustrated work on comparative functional anatomy and discusses how these challenges have been overcome through a creative reinterpretation of the pre-Darwinian classification system of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). Linnaeus divided birds into six orders which correlate loosely with the classification prevalent until the late-twentieth century. These allocations were not, however, intended to reflect evolutionary relationships, but shared behavior and habitat. It is this arrangement that I use as the framework for my own work on avian comparative anatomy, The Unfeathered Bird (Princeton University Press, 2012; new edition forthcoming.)

Session Two: Languages of Likeness

Maria Conforti 

Sapienza Università di Roma

“Fruits, Mushrooms and Trees: Botanical Imagery in Early Modern Surgery and Anatomy”

Anatomical and surgical knowledge has long been using terms and images borrowed from botanics and other fields not strictly related to medicine, such as the rich world of piante imperfette as corals or mushrooms, of exotic living beings coming from unexplored areas, such as the deep sea – or of rocks and minerals. I will argue that this imagery was both useful in descriptive terms (e. g. in the representation of tumors and other abnormal, pathological growths) as in the creation of a specific regime of representation for a science still in its infancy, anatomia practica (pathological anatomy), which fruitfully intersected the first attempts at establishing comparative anatomy as the science of the morphology of living beings. 

Samir Boumediene 

École Normale Supérieure de Lyon / I Tatti

“Anatomies of Time: Looking at the Age of Things Through Layer Visualization” 

This exploratory article reflects on the visualization of time in the early modern period. Calendars, allegories, circular diagrams, as well as clocks and hourglasses, provided a variety of devices for representing different aspects of time: the passing of time, the cyclical repetition of seasons and years, the linearity of history, the brevity of life, etc. From the second half of the seventeenth-century onwards, at the confluence of medicine, archaeology and mineralogy, the controversy over fossils and the Flood brought another aspect to the fore, namely the time of the Earth. Visualization techniques played a key role in the development of this approach, as illustrated by Nicolas Steno's concept of stratification. In the eighteenth-century, a system of comparison was gradually developed to establish a parallelism between geophysical strata and chronological periods. This talk asks to what extent the use of layers was derived from earlier visualization attempts in the history of anatomy, botany and architecture. More specifically, I want to show that if the anatomical gaze aimed to see through layers, the visualization of time consisted of seeing through the accumulation of layers.

Session Three: Violence in the Comparative

Thomas Balfe

Warburg Institute, University of London 

“Skin Deep? Visualizing Human and Animal Violence in Early Modern Gamepiece Painting”

Gamepiece paintings featuring animals killed in the course of the hunt had become a popular form of northern European art by the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Unlike depictions of hunting in progress that show the pursuit of fast-moving birds and mammals, gamepiece paintings typically isolate and still the quarry, allowing the viewer to notice the violence sustained by the animal body during and just after the final stages of the chase – bite-marks, bloodstains, cuts and wounds, ruffled fur, and more. This paper will consider how these signs of violence might have been understood in a period when the ensoulment and moral status of animals were emerging as topics of lively debate. Additionally, it will explore the possibility that the paintings could have provoked comparative reflections on the bodily and perceptual capacities of (human and nonhuman) creatures, akin to the continuities between different kinds of living entities that investigators within and beyond the discipline of anatomy were bringing to light. 

Rose Marie San Juan

University College London

“Anatomical Violence and the Pain of Resemblance”

The anatomical image, as an image on the brink of violent change, challenges the scholarly tendency to separate the development of medical knowledge from the human experience of sensation, pain, and death. The tendency has been to assume that images served to camouflage violence and conceal the brutal practices of anatomy itself. But the anatomical image is not an image of the human body like any other, autonomous and self-motivated. Violence itself transforms the body through forces that conjoined technological tools, social goals and the unpredictability introduced by violence’s own prerogatives. It is in fact the image of a body that is always in transformation between life and death and becomes constituted through the revelation and concealment of practices of vivisection.  In these practices, the relation between the human and non-human animal turns out to be very different from the much-repeated conviction that early modern anatomy produced a study of the human body as unique and inimitable.  The enigmatic sixteenth-century woodcut of three apes re-enacting the painful torture of Laocoön and his sons in the celebrated Hellenistic group statue may provide a suggestive case study.