Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1997).
Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006).
Response
In both Andrew Cunningham’s The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients and Katharine Park’s Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection, the title-page of Vesalius’s Fabrica served to elucidate each of their respective arguments. This is no source of conflict, except for those who seek it out for entertainment. Rather, we must take to heart Park’s insistence that “the sixteenth-century emblem combined highly allusive, often allegorical, images with ambiguous texts. The emblematic title page was a kind of rebus or puzzle, intentionally complicated and difficult to decipher.” As such, a comparison of Cunningham’s and Park’s interpretations of Fabrica’s title page is not a story about the triumph of the correct interpretation and the ignorance of the other, but rather a description of two different projects of inquiry.
Cunningham’s project, against the prevailing historiographic attitude of Vesalius’s role in the radical break from ancient to modern anatomy, is to establish that Vesalius’s project of inquiry was Galen’s, that Vesalius resurrected Galen’s view of the dissected body — “anatomy as structure.” This is Cunningham’s objective — the literal interpretation of Renaissance as re-naissance, of a classical anatomizing program and the body as that program saw it. And so Cunningham sees this embodied in the Fabrica title page. His interpretation rests on a, though not unlikely, unsubstantiated (by him) assumption that Vesalius was fully responsible for the allegorical contents of the title-page (So does Park’s, and I know this was common practice, but it is briskly taken for granted by both our authors — obviously, their license to interpret the title-page image entirely hinges upon their ability to associate it with Vesalius’s intentions). As Cunningham puts it himself, “[a]ll the points about Vesalius and his enterprise which I have been teasing from his biography and work, can be seen loudly and boldly announced on the title-page of the Fabrica itself.” For Cunningham the anatomy theater is also a dramatic theater, and may also a church, and at the altar stands the central actor — Vesalius — reconfiguring the anatomizing ritual. This tells us Cunningham’s first two points of emphasis for the title-page: the personal engagement of the lecturing in the dissection and the participatory nature of the ritual, with the audience in close proximity, learning from sight and touch and not text. Of further importance for Cunningham, and not at all coincidentally corroborating his central thesis, is the presence of three ancients in the foreground overlooking and consenting to Vesalius’s anatomical endeavor, whose stature defies linear perspective and who thus appear larger than life. On the right stands Aristotle, whose downward gaze to the animals to be dissected or vivisected hints at his own anatomical project of inquiry. On the left in the foreground is Galen, with his physicians’ purse, whose visage, for Cunningham, is indicative of his approval of Vesalius’s activity and, consequently, Vesalius’s rebirth of the Galenic anatomical project. For Cunningham, the title-page is a synopsis of Fabrica, a rendition of the written text (and of Cunningham’s own text) with visual rhetoric. This is a point of fruitful comparison with Park’s interpretation.
For Park, instead, the “full meaning” of Fabrica “emerged only through a careful consideration of text and image” [emphasis mine]. That is to say, the image adds to the meaning that can be gleaned from the text. What the image adds to the text, for Park, is much more complicated and less literal than for Cunningham. Whereas for Cunningham the text makes overt references to Aristotle and Galen and not so subtly places Vesalius in the center, for Park, the title-page, rather than putting its meaning on display, evokes its referents only implicitly. She points out the obvious juxtaposition of of the womb and the skeleton as a memento mori — a reminder of the inevitability of death — and acknowledges the presence of Aristotle and its significance. These nods allow her interpretation to coexist with Cunningham’s. She does not dismiss what he sees, but instead adds to it a much more elusive reference. She positions Vesalius as a striver after the patronage of the Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, to whom Fabrica was dedicated (the Epitome, a truncated form of the text was dedicated to Charles’s son Phillip II). The Holy Roman emperor was perceived to be a continuation of the Roman Julio-Claudian dynasty, and it is through the lens of this conceit that Park reads Vesalius. According to Park, Fabrica’s title-page was designed to be evocative of the stories of Julius Caesar’s birth (pulled from the womb of his dead mother) and Nero’s murder of his mother Agrippina. This evocation was alluded to punningly on the cartouche below the scene, on which the first line, larger than the others reads “CVM CAESAREO,” of course serving as the printer’s privilege, but also, for Park a citation to another semantic layer of the title-page image.
Notes
- X – “There are many possible histories of anatomy. Almost all of those which currently exist are histories of discoveries, discoveries of parts and processes; they chronicle who discovered what part, in what order, when and how. The history of anatomy I offer here is different. It is a history of projects of inquiry: what approaches different people at different times took to investigating anatomy, and why. Underlying histories of discoveries is the assumption that there is somewhere out there in Nature the true body waiting to be found, and the various stages of its being found are what constitute the history of anatomy; such a history is one long story covering tens of centuries. Underlying my approach by contrast is the assumption that there is no one true body out there waiting to be found; instead I assume that there are as many true bodies as there are differing projects of inquiry to find the ‘true one’. The history as I tell it is discontinuous; it is the story of different people seeking and finding different things because they are living and active at different — and particular — times and places.”
- “I also believe that ‘the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake’ is not an adequate answer to the question of why anyone should investigate Nature, since such investigation is always culturally and historically contingent, occurring only in certain specific places and at certain specific times. So my central questions are these: Why do people investigate Nature at all? Why in the particular ways they do? Why in the particular times and places that they do? Why do they see the particular things they see? And last but not least, why these particular people?”
- X-xi – “I see anatomizing as perhaps the oddest of all investigation in Nature on three grounds. First, because in the form in which we know it — the systematic cutting-up of dead bodies — anatomizing is unique to the western cultural tradition. Second, because of its peculiarly self-reflexive nature and the repulsion/fascination which therefore goes with it, especially within the context of a religion which treats of an immortal soul and the resurrection of the body. Third, because anatomy has the peculiarity that as a discipline and enterprise it is defined by the odd assumption that the functioning whole body which comes into existence as a whole and can only persist in existence as a whole, can nevertheless only properly be understood by cutting it up artificially into its supposed parts.”
- 3 – “The general interpretation offered by historians of the last 50 years about the nature of the anatomical Renaissance may be characterized as follows: 1. That Andreas Vesalius was the central figure whose efforts most contributed to effecting an anatomical Renaissance, and that his book of 1543 on the structure of the human body, usually referred to as the Fabrica, was the anatomical Renaissance put into print. 2. That this anatomical Renaissance consisted essentially of a rejection of the ‘dead hand’ of the ancient anatomical authorities, Aristotle and especially Galen, on the minds of Renaissance anatomists. 3. That the Ancients’ doctrines were replaced by a revival of an alternative ancient Greek tradition in anatomy, that of ‘seeing-for-oneself’ (autopsia) and personal experience of dissection. 4. That the adoption of this revived tradition of investigation brought into being the beginnings of modern, scientific, anatomy.”
- 6-7 – “So in that piece
- on Fabricius I suggested that there might well have been other, different, anatomical projects being carried out in the Renaissance — different from that of Fabricius — and which were attempts to revive the anatomical work of other Ancients of anatomy. The implication of this, in turn, is that there could have been as many anatomical projects revived in the Renaissance as there had been practised in Antiquity!”
- 7 – “If it is indeed the case, as I argue in this book, that the ancients, and the Moderns who followed them, were engaged in a number of different anatomical projects, and not just one common monolithic project, then it follows that they saw with their mind’s eye a number of different bodies: that Aristotle saw and was talking about a different concept of the body to that seen and talked about by Galen, and similarly for their Modern followers in the Reniassance. For in the first place, as we shall see, not everyone was studying the human body. And among those who were, there was disagreement about what the natural boundaries within it were, what the role of particular organs was, what pathways existed within the body, and what the relation was of certain sets of organs to others.”
- “Indeed it is on this basic criterion that historians have customarily made their judgements about which past anatomists deserve credit for their work, and which deserve blame for not seeing what was in front of their noses. But what we can take to be ‘really there’ in Nature does not depend simply on Nature but on who is doing the looking: how a given person looks largely determines what can be seen. And how you look depends, in turn, on why you came ot be looking in the first place. In other words, what you see and can see in Nature depends above all on your project of inquiry.”
- 120-1 – “Does Vesalius see a new body, one different from that seen by his contemporaries? Most certainly yes. He has resurrected Galen’s view of the dissected body, what I referred to earlier as anatomy as structure. What Vesalius sees is the human body, built on and supported by the bones, to which the muscles are attached; it has great systems of vessels (the veins, arteries and nerves). In all these ways it differs from the ‘Mundinus’ body. It still has three venters, however, though they are now dealt with in a way which puts them into properly Galenic perspective. Vesalius sees in this body most of the parts and features Galen had seen . . .. But fundamentally what Vesalius sees is the body Galen had wanted to see, and this is new.”
- 121 – “Now, with Vesalius, the body is the text. The body is a better text than Galen, and where Galen differs from the text of the body, then Galen must be ignored. The true text, the text of the human body, is in front of one’s eyes at the demonstration, and all those attending it have a duty to read it for themselves. . . . dissecting ‘the true book of ours, the human body — man himself’ who, because of his great abundance of remarkable things and the artifice of his Maker that he shows, is most worthy of being investigated.”
- 124 – “All the points about Vesalius and his enterprise which I have been teasing from his biography and work, can be seen loudly and boldly announced on the title-page of the Fabrica itself. This title-page is loaded with meanings: literal (historic), symbolic, allegorical.”
- “Vesalius is the person who put them there. We have no reason to doubt, and many reasons to trust, that Vesalius had as much control over this page as he did over any of the others. Every picture tells a story, and this one tells many.”
-
- Really? We must assumed that Vesalius is responsible for this page? Why? “Because we have no reason to doubt”? Sure we do. Is the real reason we have to make this assumption is that your analysis hinges upon it being representative of Vesalius?
- 126 – “It is in this literal way that historians have tended to look at it hitherto. But the picture is of course theatre in a different sense too: a dramatic presentation with ‘messages’, morals, for the onlooker and prospective reader of the book.”
- “Looking at it as theatre in this way we should notice the fact that our eyes are led inexorably to identify the central actor — who is Vesalius himself. And, as the central actor, Vesalius is seen at the dissection table, engaged in a performance: he is actually doing a dissection. This is the first message, and it is about personal engagement.”
- “The second message is one of changed ritual; Vesalius is the only central actor: he both lectures and dissects. The audience for this new version of an old ritual is also changed; around Vesalius are young people. They are eagerly reaching forward and touching the body; they too are participating in this ritual. The demonstration is primarily for them, the medical students; greybeards have been relegated to the back. The students are being shown how to dissect.”
- 126-7 – The there are the three extra-large figures in the foreground. . . . For they are Ancients. [Aristotle, Galen, and perhaps either Hippocrates or Herophilus]. And what are they doing? They are paying attention to, or by gesture calling attention to, Vesalius as he dissects. They are watching Vesalius resuscitating their practice. Their presence and approval makes Vesalius one of them: he is a Modern Ancient. This is the allegorical message.”
- 128 – “But originally the title-page gave a different message. For, as the original sketch of the title-page reveals, Vesalius did not initially intend there to be a skeleton at all in the picture. Hence Vesalius’s gesture was one of simply pointing upwards — to God, to heaven. And thus his message was this: personal experience of dissection of the human body, reveals God to us.”
- 128 – “If we add up these sub-title messages, we get a change in the nature of an established ritual. It is a change of personnel conducting the ritual — it is now a participatory ritual, without intermediaries; the visual rhetoric exhorts everyone to do the same; it is the resuscitation of an Ancient, a pristine or primitive, practice ; it is a practice to do with the investigation of the human body to learn more about God and His works. Moreover, the whole event is taking place in a theatre, which may also be a church — and possible even on the altar.”
- 131 – “This achievement of Vesalius does indeed mark a watershed in the history of anatomizing. It marks an attempt, a successful attempt, to restore the anatomical practice of one of the Ancients. Anatomy was transformed thereafter: not because everyone duly copied Vesalius and complied with his exhortations, but because he had made anatomy centrally important again. Indeed he had made it exciting and controversial.”
- [VESALIUS CLAIMS THAT GALEN NEVER ANATOMIZED HUMANS, PISSES SYLVIUS OFF]
- 133 – “It can be seen from such responses that both sides accepted that the claim for Galen’s authority and for the authority of the tradition built on his anatomical writings stood or fell on whether Galen had indeed dissectied humans.
