Читать книгу The Anatomical Venus - Joanna Ebenstein - Страница 39

(43) Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)—del Verrocchio’s most famous student—is said to have dissected more than one hundred bodies, and famously ‘sketched cadavers he had dissected with his own hand’ (Vasari, 1991). Da Vinci had ambi tions to publish a 120-volume set of his anatomical works in conjunction with Marc’ Antonio della Torre (1481–1511), Professor of Anatomy at Padua and Pavia Universities, but the project was abandoned after the latter’s untimely death. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), Da Vinci’s younger contemporary, studied anatomy in Florence for twelve years, and is said to have accepted a commission for the Church of the Holy Ghost on the condition that he was paid in cadavers. fig. 24 Écorché (a study of the human muscles without skin) in pen and ink, by Ludovico Cardi (1559–1613), known as Il Cigoli. fig. 25 Michelangelo Buonarotti’s preparatory sketch of the Libyan Sibyl for the Sistine chapel (1510–11). fig. 24 fig. 25 It was Flemish professor of surgery and anatomy at Padua University, Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) who revolutionized the study of anatomy at this time. His monumental work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) was lavishly illustrated with woodcuts thought to be by Titian’s studio in Venice. This masterwork was published in 1543—the same year as Copernicus’s controversial publication De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which described the planets’ rota tion around the Sun and debunked the canonical belief that the entire cosmos revolved around Earth. Both books marked dramatic paradigm shifts in their respective disciplines, and questioned beliefs that had been founded on faith rather than empirical observation. oVerleaF L’Ange Anatomique (The Flayed Angel) (1746), a mezzotint of a beautiful, fashionably coiffed anatomized woman, by Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty, a pioneer of medical colour mezzotint printing. AV_00966_pre-pdf layout_001_215.indd 43 12/01/2016 12:14 THE BIRTH OF THE anaTOmIcal VEnUS[1]