Did the images in De Fabrica represent a naturalistic body?

Did the images in De Fabrica represent a naturalistic body?
ID Number: 1306706
Being Human: Human Nature from the Renaissance to Freud
Word Count: 1991


Did the images in De Fabrica represent a naturalistic body?
The images of the body in De Fabrica did represent a naturalistic body to the eyes of Vesalius and his contemporaries even though they look un-naturalistic to modern eyes. This is because in the 16th century there was entrenched in intellectual thought and wider culture an Aristotelian conception of nature and what the human is, and should be, which is radically different to ours. I will then argue in this essay that this formation of the human body that was based in classical texts is the one portrayed in De Fabrica which may seem like an idealised version of the body to us but to those in the 16th century it seemed perfectly natural and that in that time the idealised body was the naturalistic body. I will do this first by defining Naturalism in Art and then by showing that the images in De Fabrica are formed through the humanist intellectual atmosphere Vesalius was educated in. To further that I will explain the importance of Aristotle's natural philosophy and the canonical body formulated by Polycleitus to the representations of the body in De Fabrica. Along with this I will explain the importance of the practical purpose of the depictions in explaining anatomical knowledge and how this made the images in De Fabrica more naturalistic. In short, the purpose of this essay is to show that within the aesthetic and intellectual context of the humanist Renaissance the images in De Fabrica do represent a naturalistic body.
Naturalism is a tendency in art that implies an emphasis on the accurate representation of nature; this includes man and his works with a focus on physical appearance and behaviour. Vesalius in the preface to De Fabrica sets out that 'the books present in sufficient detail the number, site, shape, size, substance, connection to other parts, use and function of each part of the human body'. This then shows overlap in the purpose of De Fabrica and the traditional aims of naturalistic art. The illustrations then will play an important role in framing this practical description. Furthermore periods where there has been a rise in naturalistic representation in the arts has often been intertwined with scientific naturalism, such as the Renaissance period. Naturalism here meant an effort to portray and interpret human life with scientific objectivity and accuracy. This again is what Vesalius aimed to achieve not just through correcting the mistakes of Galen to be scientifically more accurate but also through some of the most detailed and precise woodcut printing that had been achieved up to that point. Aesthetics was being used as a science; in the pursuit of truth it must and had to be as naturalistic as the facts compelled it to be.
Vesalius's thought was grounded in the humanist principles of his time. He learnt classical Greek, Latin and Hebrew. At the Castle School of the University of Louvain he studied philosophy, logic and rhetoric afterwards he moved to Paris to study at the prestigious school of medicine where he learnt further from classical texts of Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Rhazes. His education in anatomy would have been primarily from the book. Paris, like Louvain, would have socialised Vesalius into the humanist ideology of a focus on returning to, and understanding thoroughly, original classical sources of medical knowledge in order to have a clear and sound basis for the principles of medicine. It would have been from this background that Vesalius would have formulated his conception of the naturalistic body shown in De Fabrica.
His conception of the naturalistic body is shown through his approach to dissections and how that is rooted in classical thought. In dissections Vesalius aimed for the bodies of middle aged men or women with temperate complexions as a the perfect kind of body with which one could use to compare to the Canon sculpture by Polycleitus which was considered in the 16th century as a the perfect representation of what proportions the body should be if it had a good humoral balance, Galen also used Polycleitus's sculpture for the same purpose. Polycleitus used Pythagorean geometry as well as the principles of symmetry and ratio to establish his canonical body; he determined the ideal body through an aesthetic choice. In De Fabrica statues such as the Belvedere Toro, a roman sculpture based on the Canon, were used as the basis to create images showing the renal and seminal veins.
Vesalius was working within the general sprit of the Renaissance as men became aware again of the beauty of the human body and endeavoured to represent it in a naturalistic way. This differed from Medieval times in that Renaissance artists used newly excavated statues from Ancient Rome and Greece and observations of nature to inform their art. They, like Vesalius, were driven by a desire to understand the inner workings of the figure such as the structure.
The bodies of these statutes, although based on idealised portrayals of classical heroes and mythological men, were being used in De Fabrica to present facts as they were known then and so by extension being used to portray nature. This creates a tension in the images between naturalism and idealism; one that is resolved when Aristotelian natural philosophy is accounted for. Vesalius took the term Fabrica from the a stoic notion expressed by Cicero of an object that is formed, created or fashioned by a maker, god, nature or creator of things that informs the sense that parts were fashioned to fulfil certain functions so when they did not conform to their purposed creation they were not healthy. Vesalius used the phrase 'according to nature' to describe the idealised body, the non-monstrous body. The canonical body of Polycleitus is then the natural body. This is derived further from Aristotelian natural philosophy that imbued intellectual structures of thinking of the time. In Aristotle's conception of nature there was a distinction between the natural, praeternatural and things against nature. Natural things were those that followed their nature in order to fulfil their purpose. Praeternatural was when this went wrong, e.g. when someone was born with six fingers on one hand or more generally with disease or putrefaction, nature had failed to achieve its goal however the cause is still rooted generally within nature in the sense that the cause might be found in an unstable part of nature. Thus the natural body, for Vesalius, would have had no praeternatural parts. In addition it would be the body that perfectly fulfils its teleological functions, in essence the canonical body created by Polycleitus.
Therefore the images in De Fabrica are then at once idealised to our contemporary eye but naturalistic to the eye of Vesalius as they encapsulate 16th century Renaissance conceptions of the natural body. In his preface Vesalius defines anatomy as a science of the human body and as a natural philosophy. To add to this in the front piece Vesalius is shown dissecting a woman's body with the classical figures of Galen and Aristotle watching over him. This, and the first portrait of Vesalius, is aimed to show his indebtedness to them. Despite this Galen is criticised and corrected throughout De Fabrica as Galen based much of his knowledge on the dissection of animals whereas Vesalius wanted to go back to the Alexandrian practice of human dissection, an aim Galen ultimately shared as he studied in Alexandria.
This brings us on to the second part of the definition of naturalism used at the beginning of this essay; mainly that naturalistic art is also focused on the appearance and behaviour of the body. This means the way anatomical knowledge was depicted in the images of the body in De Fabrica was also naturalistic in its manner. For example drawings of the jawbone were done from slightly different angles in De Fabrica in order to show the human structure as clearly as possible. Vesalius would often intervene and work closely with artist to make sure the anatomical details were optimised to show greater detail of deep anatomical layers and structures. There are more than two hundred figures in De Fabrica. Vesalius structured the book to mirror the layer of the human body starting from the bones and moving outwards and he had the same intentions for the images to be able to show the layers of the human body and how they relate to one another. In doing so he frames the natural behaviour through the images in the book and consequently links it back to the Aristotelian notion that an object is natural when it fulfils its function, in this case the behaviour of certain parts of the human body in relation to one another.
In Book 5 of De Fabrica it shows the presentation of visceral anatomy as if through the dissection of fragmentary antique sculpture. The body becomes the artefact. But more so it allows the images to become socially acceptable as it avoids the violence of the process of gaining anatomical knowledge and defines a particular set of cultural conditions in which these facts can be validated as systematic knowledge. However to use this seems like he has removed the natural body and replaced it with an idealised canonical body in order to validate his anatomical knowledge. As there has been a deep aversion, even since Galen, to the physical act of cutting up a dead body as a violation of the dead so a realistic and gory depiction would have been unpalatable to society. But this is something else different to the objectification of the body as it was still portrayed in line with Aristotelean natural philosophy and so by definition still natural. This instead is the disassociation from the natural act of anatomical dissection in the images of the body in De Fabrica, not a departure from the use of what constituted the naturalistic body.
Harcourt however argues that this reorganisation of anatomical knowledge into a descriptive structure has a normative power and so equals a radical transformation of the human body. I don't necessarily dispute this as Vesalius needed to legitimise the anatomical knowledge he was proposing within and through the discursive structures of his time. However I argue that he did not radically transform the body beyond its naturalistic state to idealise it and make it acceptable but instead he aimed to get closer to nature through the ancient texts than anyone else had as he interpreted that 16th century medicine had fragmented from the classical teachings and, more importantly, the traditional ancient Greek practices of medicine. Consequently what was he saw in the practical application of medical knowledge in the 16th century was a great divergence from what the authoritative classical texts demanded. Is the canonical body in De Fabrica a normative body? Yes but this not an active deception as they are still naturalistic presented in the bounds of the Renaissance natural body therefore it is not idealised. Furthermore the graphic myological images of the body in Books 1 and 2 of the De Fabrica are quite graphic showing the muscular body in a naturalistic state. Therefore Harcourt is misplaced in his judgement that Vesalius created an idealised image of the body.
Overall the images of the body in De Fabrica do represent a naturalistic body when judged in context within the prevailing humanist intellectual matrix that structured and legitimised medical discourse in 16th century Europe. They conform to the ideas of Aristotelian natural philosophy in their embodiment of the canonical body as the natural body, in addition to this the way they present and frame anatomical knowledge and the teleological method is naturalistic. From our eyes this looks like an idealised version of the body but for them it was based on their foundation of knowledge from classical texts and practical reinforcement of Aristotelian natural philosophy and so was created with the purpose of being a naturalistic representation of the body.
Bibliography
Harcourt, Glenn, 'Andreas Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture', Representations, No. 17, Special Issue: The Cultural Display of the Body (Winter, 1987), pp. 28-61
Kusukawa, Sachiko, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago, 2012) p.214
Munro, Thomas, 'Meanings of "Naturalism" in Philosophy and Aesthetics', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter, 1960), pp. 133-137
M. Ivins Jr, William, 'The Woodcuts to Vesalius', The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 7 (Jul., 1936), pp. 139-142
Nutton, Vivian, 'The Man' Historical Introduction to an annotated translation of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Daniel Garrison and Malcolm Hast, (2003, North-western University), http://vesalius.northwestern.edu/
Sigerist, Henry E., 'The foundation of human anatomy in the Renaissance', Sigma Xi Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 1 (March, 1934), pp. 8-12
Siraisi, Nancy G., 'Vesalius and Human Diversity in De humani corporis Fabrica', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 57, (1994), pp. 60-88
Tobin, Richard, 'The Canon of Polykleitos', American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Oct., 1975), pp. 307-321




Thomas Munro, 'Meanings of "Naturalism" in Philosophy and Aesthetics', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter, 1960), pp. 133-137
Glenn Harcourt, 'Andreas Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture', Representations, No. 17, Special Issue: The Cultural Display of the Body (Winter, 1987), pp. 28-61
William M. Ivins Jr, 'The Woodcuts to Vesalius', The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 7 (Jul., 1936), pp. 139-142
Munro, 'Meanings of Naturalism', pp.135-136
Vivian Nutton, 'The Man' Historical Introduction to an annotated translation of the 1543 and 1555 editions of
Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Daniel Garrison and Malcolm Hast, (2003, North-western University), http://vesalius.northwestern.edu/
Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago, 2012) p.214
Richard Tobin, 'The Canon of Polykleitos', American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Oct., 1975), pp. 307-321
Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, p.215
Henry E. Sigerist, 'The foundation of human anatomy in the Renaissance', Sigma Xi Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 1 (March, 1934), pp. 8-12
Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, pp.218-19
Nancy G. Siraisi, 'Vesalius and Human Diversity in De humani corporis Fabrica', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 57, (1994), pp. 60-88
Nutton, 'The Book' in an Historical introduction, http://vesalius.northwestern.edu/
Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, pp.208-210
Harcourt, 'Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture', p.29
Harcourt, 'Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture', p.37
Harcourt, 'Vesalius and the Anatomy in the Renaissance', p.39