Bulletin of the History of Medicine

The seminal period of Renaissance medical illustration was the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when medieval practices were exchanged for empirical investigation. The advent of printing and print-making provided the opportunity for the dissemination of ideas central to the study of anatomy. In the writing and illustration of the medical treatise, the physician won fame for his translation of a classical authority, while the artist displayed his command of the natural world. It is the collaboration of the artist and the physician, as well as the history of medicine, that is displayed and discussed in The Ingenious Machine of Nature, which is a marvelous compendium.

In “Theater of the Body,” Mimi Cazort underscores the fascination we have with the body. It is not surprising that despite dictates against the dissection of the human figure, humans’ desire to learn what they are made of defied religious and ethical boundaries. “You cannot experience your own interior by closing your eyes and concentrating on it, you must investigate the insides of someone else” (p. 13).

Monique Kornell, in “The Human Machine,” surveys the development of hand- or drawing books of artistic anatomy, which are still in use today. In the sixteenth century, drawing books (such as those created by Leonardo and Michaelangelo) and anatomical atlases aided the artist. During the seventeenth century, new subjects such as embryology and gynecology developed along with new centers of medicine, and artists unfamiliar with these subjects were in need of reference books to aid their study and execution of illustrations. Manuals emphasized the skeleton, muscles, and the nude body. Spanning three centuries was artists’ use of a fine plaster écorché figurine. Vesalius remained very popular in the seventeenth century, and artists throughout Europe owned a copy of his text. Kornell also deals with manuals for women artists by William F. Wells, a London watercolorist who between 1796 and 1836 published books to educate women artists and assure a sense of naturalism and anatomical accuracy in their work. [End Page 318]

“The Contents of Anatomical Illustration,” by K. B. Roberts, begins with a definition of human anatomy as a descriptive science of living human beings and visual things in nature. The Renaissance studio had as its focus the human figure and depicted images of normative or flayed figures as seen in the work of Bandinelli and that of Volcher Coiter. As well, Berengario da Carpi and Vesalius directed artists and physicians to their material on the superficial muscles. Manuals for art are still being produced, but few will be able to match the exhilarating images by artists such as John Bell (1763–1820). Bell’s engravings of the muscles are extraordinary—as Roberts comments, they are reminiscent of Vesalius. Roberts’s final question is what Bell’s work might have been had he known Leonardo.

In this volume, illustrations and footnotes are presented in a clear and unusual way—by putting the illustration and its reference on the same page; the reader is thus saved from having to seek out a citation in the back of the book. However, this tactic leads to problems when the same artist or epoch is discussed by more than one writer. For example, discussions of the écorché are located in three different essays, and the reader is required to juggle the text, paging back and forth, to gather all the information provided. Further, there is no index of the artists included in the book—an addition that would have enhanced the text and images and increased the volume’s didactic value.