DYNAMIC ANATOMY MUSCULAR DESCRIPTION. FROM ANDREAS VESALIUS (1514-1564,DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA
L PrEmise THE DUALISM OF ART AND SCIENCE YEAR is538.In the town of Padua.hardly twenty miles from the great brisk wind is blowing.A large concourse of students and observers has gathered to watch him.His subject is anatomy and they are here to see a dissection.A smile flits cross his intense face.He is new here and already his demonstrations have received wide acclaim and respect. The excited murmur of voices quiets as he steps down from his chair high on a dais before the semicircular bank of benches in the hall.He moves confidently toward a long center table with its array of instruments.A year earlier he had created a stir among his colleagues by arrogantly rejecting the help of demonstrators"and"ostensors"in the practice of dissection.To him,the practice of dissection is art,and the anatomical dis covery of man as the living reflection of God is worthy of the highest personal dedication. His dark eyes fix on the subject before him.It is a cadaver,the corpse of a crim inal,and it has not been very well preserved.It is held in a standing position with a pulley rope looped around the back of the head,supported from a beam at the ceiling He reach- es for a knife.His high forehead with its tight curls gleams in the sallow light as he bends forward.His hand is sure.He has done this many times before.From his carliest davs in his father's house in Brussels,to his student days in Louvain and at the University of Paris, he has done this.Now,as Professor of Surgery appointed by the Senate of Venice to the University of Padua the year before,he is about to perform another dissection. But this time it is different.The young Professor of Surgery is engaged in a search.It is a time of knowledge.enlightenment,and invention.It is a time of voyaging and very.And this time he has embarked on a voyage of discovery all his own. 5
DINAMIC ANATOMY DISSECTED FIGURE WOODCUT.UNKNOW FROM ANDREAS VESALIUS （1514-1564
THE DUALISM OF ART AND SCIENCE He is fully conscious of his purpose.He knows well the importance of his task. In his mind's eye parade the great figures of classical antiquity-Hippocrates,Aristotle, Herophilus,Galen-those exalted men whose observations have laid the basis for his undertaking.Earlier in the year he had published with instantaneous success his fugi- tive sheets.the Tabulae sex.Now he is afire with an idea.With his keen eve.sharp knife and steady hand he will cut through the veil of time and mystic belief and lay open the matrix of man.Below the lavers of skin and tissue he will observe and record the struc- ture of human form Knife in hand,he reaches out and makes a swift longitudinal incision from rib cage to pubis in the body of the cadaver. DISSECTION The young man,Professor of Surgery at Padua,is but twenty-four years old.His WOODCUT.UNKNOWN name is Andreas Wesel,but in the Latinate convention of that day,we know him as Andreas FOLLOWE Vesalius.In four years'time,his work ANDREAS VESALIUS will be done.In four years'time,he will (1514-1564 have produced some seven works in text and graphic illustration published unde the title De humani corboris fabrica-The Structure of the Human Body.He will be twenty-eight years old,but he will have swept away for all time the obscurantism of almost two thousand years of philo sophical inertia.He will be called the Reformer of Anatomy,and he will take his place in history as ushering in the modern scientific era of medical and physiological discovery. A brisk wind blew in Padua that day.But another wind was blowing-the wind of humanism and new science,the Renaissance-blowing across the length and breadth of Europe.In that era a three pronged assault would be launched against the bastions of scholastic conservatism and aca- demic rigidity.The Platonic-Aristotelian construct of the universe would be rent by Francis Bacon's description of scientific logic and empirical method in the Novum organum;the geostatic cosmology would be torn asunder and made heliocentric in Nicholas Copernicus'De;myth and speculation would be forever dispelled in human anatomy in Andreas Vesalius'De humani corporis fabrica.Macrocosm
DYNAMIC ANATOMY and microcosm-the deterministic mover of the universe superimposed on the predestined behavior of man-held together in a fixed logic of idealist dogma,would come crashing down.Renaissance thought,from that day to this,would introduce a new advance in the rational powers of man,and new light would be shed on the phenomenol ogy of natural causation.The Augean stables of the mind would be ready for the Tiber. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth century was an intellectual break. through of such magnitude as to compare with the greatest achievements in human history.Not since the rise of Greek civilization had its like occured.Renaissance humanism had signalized the end of the Middle Ages,and the hierarchy of social formalism was crumbling.The emancipation of the individual from feudal servility presaged the dawn of democratic institutions.The age of science had begun and the early outlines of modern man had appeared on the stage of history. Profound as the breakthrough was in medicine,mathematics,physics,astronomy, and natural science,the achievement in art was equally spectacular and dramatic.The Renaissance inaugura ted an entirely new concept in expressive form.It was not so much a change in subject matter as it was a working out of new solutions to older problems.The themes were scriptural still,but the stress,the emphasis of its approach.was the portrayal of religious ideas as pisodes in human history.God as man and man as humanity were extolled as the aim of art.The impact focused on the deeply felt human experiences of the times,and reve caled the pers al significance of faith.In this sense,the new art ceased to be withdrawn,austere,symbolic,essentially decorative in character.Instead,it became an innately human,warmly imagistic,pictorial art.It served a moral purpose through education and reason,rather than through fear and obedience.Scientific discovery,break. down of feudal barriers in social structure,and the increased importance of the individual persona led to the profound metamorphosis in Renaissance art Fundamental to this change was the naturalistic representation of the human figure,the primacy of anatomical man.From this premise,concepts of form,space,and design structure in the two-dimensional flat surface of the picture were subjected to the rationale of scientific method and analysis.Thus,the investigation in medical anatomy and physiology through human dissection led toa powerful insight in artistic anatomy and the rectitude of human form:the mathematics of navigation and exploration,contributing a geomeury of space instead of planes,touched off the development of visual perspective in the control and measurement of the third dimension:the new heliocentric astronomy 8