Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Anatomical Art

Frederick MacMonnies
Young Faun and Heron
1890
bronze statuette
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Michael Ayrton
Icarus Transformed I
1961
bronze
Tate Modern, London

Charles Donker
Skull of a Heron
1970-72
etching
British Museum

Jacques Gamelin
Winged Skeleton holding an Anatomical Drawing
1779
etching, engraving
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Anatomical Timeline

275 BC  Herophilus teaches anatomy, Alexandria, Egypt; performs dissections of human bodies

ca. 150  Galen dissects apes, monkeys, cows, dogs; writes treatises on human anatomy

ca. 600-1100  Knowledge of Greek anatomical treatises lost to Western Europeans, but retained in Byzantium and the Islamic world; Islamic scholars translate Greek anatomical treatises into Arabic

1100s-1500s  Galen's anatomical treatises re-enter Europe, translated from Arabic into Latin, later from the Greek originals

1235  First European medical school founded at Salerno, Italy; human bodies publicly dissected

1316  Mondino de'Liuzzi stages public dissections in Bologna; writes Anatomia  

1450s  Moveable type invented; copperplate engraving invented

1490  Anatomical theater opens in Padua

1491  First illustrated printed medical book published in Venice, Johannes de Ketham, Fasciculus medicinae

ca. 1500-1540  Earliest printed illustrated anatomies

1510  Leonardo da Vinci dissects human bodies, makes extensive anatomical drawings

1543  First profusely illustrated printed anatomy, Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica

1670s-1690s  First museum collections of anatomical specimens; first art academies with anatomy as core curriculum

 adapted from exhibition materials issued by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division

Hellenistic Statuette
Hermes
1st century BC - 1st century AD
bronze
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

attributed to Jean Raon
Jupiter 
(after antique marble in the Giustiniani Collection in Rome)
ca. 1670
bronze statuette
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

John Sloan
Anschutz on Anatomy, or, Anatomy Lesson at the New York School of Art
1912
etching
British Museum

David Scott
Two Women laying out a Corpse
before 1849
watercolor
British Museum

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Study of Figure in the pose of The Dying Gaul
ca. 1792
drawing
Tate Britain

Henry Wallis
Study for the painting Chatterton
ca. 1856
drawing
Tate Britain

Antonio Balestra
The Dead Christ
ca. 1721
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Michelangelo
Seated Figure and two Arm-studies
ca. 1510-11
drawing
Albertina, Vienna

William Orpen
Anatomical Study - Turning Man, after Michelangelo
ca. 1906
drawing
Tate Britain

François Lemoyne
Bacchus
ca. 1730-40
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

attributed to Cesare Dandini
Study of Michelangelo's statue of Night from the Medici Tombs in Florence
before 1658
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art