Theatrical Bodies: Acting Out Comedy and Tragedy in Two Anatomical Displays

Abstract

Culturally constructed relationships between art, science, and economics are reflected in human anatomy displays and entwined with their rhetorical efficacy. This paper juxtaposes Andre Vesalius’ 1543 book of anatomy, On the Fabric of the Human Body, with the contemporary anatomy display Bodies … The Exhibition in order to think about the cultural contexts that inform these works, the unique intents of their designers, and the visual similarities and differences that in some ways unite them and in other ways mark them as centuries apart. Ultimately, what becomes clear is how these two displays manifest two alternate visions—one Comic and one Tragic—of the human anatomy, both reflective of their cultural contexts.

Acknowledgments

David Gruber earned his master of professional writing degree from the University of Southern California and is currently a doctoral student in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Program at North Carolina State University. His research interests are in the rhetoric of the human body, philosophy of technology, and media history.

Notes

The location is both a theater and a medical laboratory; anatomical lectures at the time often took place in what we might call a theater.

The opening and destroying of the womb in the image suggests a masculine power over life and death. This is little surprise given the male-dominated historical context that infused anatomical science, where, as one example, only men were allowed to attend anatomy lectures and pursue the science.

The fact that the displays produce either a Comic or a Tragic vision, I believe, is the outcome of larger cultural allowances put in service of specific purposes in specific historical moments; the Comic or Tragic visions discussed herein do not, in other words, necessarily indicate to the reader an overriding cultural worldview about how all people think about or view the human anatomy.

Vesalius likely did not enter into the production of the Fabrica primarily for sales profits since the book had many other more significant side benefits, as outlined in this paper. Further, Vesalius spent a lot of money just to produce the Fabrica (see O’Malley, 1964) and, being so costly, the book's indirect benefits surely outweighed direct financial ones. His primary purpose was probably, as he says, to correct Galen and establish new methods of anatomical research (see the Fabrica). This researcher takes him at his word, and the boldness of his title image lends this view support.

It should be noted that scholarship has shown that Vesalius worked with an unknown artist to produce many of the drawings for the Fabrica; however, it is clear that Vesalius did contribute to the drawings and was himself considered an artist (see Saunders & O’Malley, 1973, pages 19–21).

Works by Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) that mimic and explore images produced by Vesalius are worth noting here since they too show how Vesalius’ expressive bodies can prove effective in (re)presenting human experience. Although Lawrence's works are outside the purview of this paper, those images may be productive toward thinking about the way human emotions are communicated in anatomical imagery and, in particular, in Vesalius’ work—as well as how flesh–and-bone imagery can be used to craft identifications across diverse audiences.

This is not to suggest that absolutely all Italian Renaissance art focused on perfect, beautiful bodies free from decay, only that the standard procedure of drawing the perfect body as well as the body as the standard for shape and balance may have lent Vesalius’ images increased resonance.