Violence and the Genesis of the Anatomical Image 9780271094144

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Violence and the Genesis of the Anatomical Image

Violence and the Genesis of the Anatomical Image Rose Marie San Juan

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: San Juan, Rose Marie, author. Title: Violence and the genesis of the anatomical image / Rose Marie San Juan. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines the function of violence in the making of the anatomical image during the early modern era, exploring its effects on the production of knowledge and on concepts of the body”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022032703 | ISBN 9780271093352 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Anatomy, Artistic—History. | Violence in art. Classification: LCC NC760 .S24 2023 | DDC 743.4/9—dc23/eng/20220811 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032703 Parts of chapter 1 appeared previously in “The Turn of the Skull: Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori,” Art History 35, no. 5 (2012): 958–75. A version of chapter 4 appeared previously as “Gaetano Zumbo’s Anatomical Wax Model: From Skull to Cranium,” in Imaging the Brain: Episodes in the History of Brain Research, edited by Chiara Ambrosio and William MacLehose (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2018), 75–105. Additional credits: page ii, Figure holding sack of skin, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (fig. 22); page vi, Ercole Lelli, female wax model (Eve), from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47 (plate 18). Copyright © 2023 Rose Marie San Juan All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Contents

List of Illustrations  vii Acknowledgments x

Introduction: Violence and the Image in Transition  1 1. Bodily Animation: Bones, Skulls, and Skeletons  35 2. Bodily Mutation: From Muscles to Flesh and Blood  65 3. Bones in Transit, Flesh in Shreds: Anatomy and the New World Cannibal  97 4. Between Face and Brain: Recalibrating the Head  127 5. The Rib Within: The Wax Model and the Violence of Embodiment  157

Notes 185 Bibliography 195 Index 204

Illustrations Plates (following page 148) 1. Annibale Carracci, An Execution, ca. 1600 2. Monastery of San Giovanni Decollato, Rome 3. Flagellation, Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, ca. 1560 4. Deposition, Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, ca. 1560 5. Crucifixion, Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, ca. 1560 6. Detail of marks on surface of Deposition, ca. 1560 7. St. John the Baptist, Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, ca. 1550 8. Aelbert Jansz van der Schoor, Still Life with Skulls, ca. 1650 9. The death of the eleven thousand virgins, St. Albans Chronicle, ca. 1420 10. Reliquaries of the eleven thousand virgins, Church of St. Ursula, Cologne, ca. 1600 11. Two skulls of the eleven thousand virgins, Il Gesù, Rome 12. Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, head (front), wax model, ca. 1690 13. Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, head (underside), wax model, ca. 1690 14. Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, head (back), wax model, ca. 1690 15. Juan de Mesa, St. John the Baptist, ca. 1625 16. Portrait of a Woman (Vanitas), ca. 16900 17. Anna Morandi Manzolini, Self Portrait, ca. 1760 18. Ercole Lelli, female wax model (Eve), from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47 19. Ercole Lelli, female model (Eve) and skeleton, from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47 20. Ercole Lelli, male wax model (Adam), from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47 21. Ercole Lelli, figure with second layer of muscles, from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47 22. Jan Gossaert, Adam and Eve, ca. 1520 23. Detail of Ercole Lelli, female model (Eve), from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47 24. God Clothes Adam and Eve with Skin Tunics, 17th century 25. Detail of Ercole Lelli, female model (Eve) from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47 26. Ava encounters her face, from the film Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland, 2014 Figures 1. Breaking wheel, from Antonio Gallonio, Trattato de gli instrumenti di martorio (1591) 10 2. Criminal soldiers on the breaking wheel on a scaffold, from Jacques Callot, Great Miseries and Misfortunes of War (1633) 11 3. The martyrdom of Thomas Holland, from Mathias Tanner, Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis et vitae profusionem (1675) 13 4. Illustrated letter L (man cut down from scaffold), from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 18 5. Detail of Public anatomy lesson, frontispiece, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 20 6. Padua Anatomy Theater, from J. Tomasini, Theatrum anatomicum Lycei Patavini (1654) 21 7. Vivisection table, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 22

8. Thoracic cavity, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 9. Frontispiece from Andreas Vesalius, Anatomia (1604) 10. Frontispiece from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Anatomia del corpo humano (1560) 11. Frontispiece from Realdo Colombo, De re anatomica (1559) 12. Illustrated letter O (putti boiling skull), from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 13. Five skulls, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 14. Skull lying on its side, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 15. Skull underside, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 16. Skeleton contemplating a skull, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 17. Skeleton weeping, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 18. Skeletal figure hanging from rope, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 19a–b. Adam / Eve, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica liborium epitome (1543) 20. Adam and Eve, from Thomas Geminus, Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio (1545) 21. Adam and Eve, frontispiece from Vivae imagines partium corporis humani (1572) 22. Figure holding sack of skin, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (1556) 23. Figure displaying muscles, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 24. Figure with reproductive organs, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (1556) 25. Frontispiece from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, La anatomia del corpo humano (1586) 26. Figures with viscera, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (1556) 27. Figure with viscera, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 28. Figure holding intestines, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (1556) 29. Figure with intestines, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 30. Niccolò Boldrini (attr.), Apes enacting the “Laocoön,” ca. 1530 31. Intestines with cuirass, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (1556) 32. Trophy of Marius, from Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (ca. 1550) 33. Two figures joined in dissection, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (1556) 34. Figure with internal cavity exposed, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543) 35. Adam and Eve, from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae (1592) 36. Cannibal feast, from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae (1592)

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25 36 40 42 46 46 47 51 52 55 56 59 60 63 68 69 75 77 81 81 86 86 87 91 91 93 94 98 98

37. Frontispiece from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae (1592) 38. Tupinamba warriors, from Jean de Léry, Histoire de’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578) 39. The preparation of mingau, from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae (1592) 40. Women and children eating mingau, from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae (1592) 41. The Removal of Saint Francis Xavier’s Arm, eighteenth century 42. Detail of Francesco Bressani, “Nuova Francia acurata delineatio” (1657) 43. Skulls and other bones, seventeenth century 44. Children boiling a skull, from Hans Staden, True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (1557) 45. Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, dissected head, from Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du roi (1749) 46. Johann Dryander, dissection of the head, from Anatomia capitis humani (1536) 47. Frontispiece from Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, De fractura cranei (1518) 48. Figure on table with cross section of the brain, from Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres (1545) 49. Frontispiece from Thomas More, Utopiae insulae figura (1516) 50. Preparation of brain, from Frederik Ruysch, Epistola anatomica (1744) 51. Anna Morandi Manzolini, hands and the sense of touch (ca. 1760) 52. Ercole Lelli, cabinet of anatomy (ca. 742–47) 53. Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg, Leiden Anatomy Theater (1610) 54. Ercole Lelli, Self Portrait (ca. 1766)

106 108 109 110 115 117 117 118

135 141 141 146 148 151 154 158 160 169

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Acknowledgments A book brings together countless experiences that have shaped it, but these experiences are usually not limited to what ultimately appears in the book. My efforts to see the tavolette of the Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, the little painted panels shown to condemned people at the time of their execution, was one such unforeseen opportunity and one for which I could fill an entire page of acknowledgments. For months I attempted to get access to the complex of San Giovanni Decollato (closed and left partly without identifiable administration). I talked to all the neighbors, including the staff of the attached elegant hotel, 47, that is the source of the confraternity’s charity funds; I got to know the South American nuns temporarily housed in the church’s vacant living quarters, learned about their precarious life in Rome, and even considered joining them; I attended various civic government meetings that dealt with the intervention of lay charities in urban poverty; and I searched for information at the local bar over countless coffees. Finally, someone in the bar gave me a little piece of paper with a phone number and I reached an unnamed person in the Office of Lay Charities who told me that the confraternity had arranged a date for its annual meeting and might let me into the room I needed to see. Those attending the meeting didn’t know why I was there, didn’t know about the abject little paintings in a cabinet in the far corner of their meeting room, and in any case could not find the keys. They were amazed to learn what their early modern predecessors did with the images, and they were intrigued when I showed them how to hold one of the tavolette up to someone’s face by the handle so I could photograph it. The current problems of the institution and its neglected images (both prestigious frescoes and the overlooked tavolette) cannot be detached from the social life and struggles of the neighborhood or from the complicated political, cultural, and religious networks of the city at large. The insights I gained went far beyond what is possible with the consultation of books and documents. Yet the library is a wonderful place, as many of us were reminded when the British Library reopened after many months of working only from the screen. I thank the staff of the British Library for understanding what it meant to be back among the books and in the company of others. I have been very lucky to have around me the generous and stimulating colleagues and students in the History of Art Department at University College London. I don’t take this for granted, and I especially thank Richard Taws, Diana Dethloff, Alison Wright, Fred Schwartz, Allie Stielau, Natasha Eaton, Tamar Garb, Eleanor Day, and Bob Mills; I am indebted to the various and diverse communities of early modern scholars and students, including Michael Gaudio, Angela Vanhaelen, Todd Olson, Lyle Massey, Evelyn Lincoln, David Kim, Anne Dunlop, Patricia Reilly, Mark McDonald, and Alina Payne, for they retain a critical and social commitment to our endeavors and remind me that what we do matters,

even if so much in the academic world has become rather discouraging. I thank all of my dear friends in Rome, especially the feisty members of Rickey’s Salon, my friends and neighbors in Testaccio, Cavaliere Portia Prebys for the gift of Ferrara and the help gaining access to church officials, and especially Carolyn Valone (whose presence for me will always be in Rome) for her sound guidance on book and life matters. And I thank my family in Canada, my brilliant movie and theater chat groups, my friends for endless conversations over online teas and cocktails, and the constant exchange of witty videos and images by all as I struggled to pull the book together during this strange past year. I cannot name everyone to whom I am indebted, but I cannot fail to mention Mechthild Fend, Maria Loh, Joanna Woodall, Sarah Monks, Bronwen Wilson, Stephanie Schwartz, Marian Campbell, Dian Kriz, and Briony Fer.

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Introduction Violence and the Image in Transition

W

hy the rush to see someone die? People climb to the top of the wall, strain forward, and jostle others, frantic to see with their own eyes the end of life (plate 1). Anticipation increases, sensation intensifies, but what can be seen at such a moment of turmoil and uncertainty? Those eager to see could turn to the body of the man already hanging from the scaffold, now beyond life and available for observation. Yet they have moved to the other end of the wall in order to have better access to the next hanging. All eyes search in expectation that this time something about the transition from life to death might become visible. The people in the crowd do not look to the past—the man already dead—or even to the future, the man being pulled up the ladder but still out of their sight. Instead they activate a present moment, a sliver of time in which potential is unleashed but disruption holds sway. For us, those looking at the drawing rather than attending the execution, time works differently. We are offered a strategic viewing point: the two men subjected to the punishment of hanging are paired for us as a before-and-after image. Each man is a discrete point in time within the narrative of execution, but also the same human body in different states of being. Time can flow in opposite directions: from right to left, one man has just been executed and a second will soon follow; from left to right, the living body is transformed into the lifeless corpse. But does this opportunity for attentive reflection at the threshold of death reveal any more about this transition than the immediate moment that belongs to the crowd of onlookers? Probably not, but what it does suggest is that while the crowd, by being in the present moment, feels much but sees little, the viewer of the drawing, which has been organized for extended observation, sees much but does not feel enough. The desire to see the transition between life and death is usually regarded with suspicion and even moral indignation. As Michel Foucault wrote, “Capital punishment remains fundamentally, even today, a spectacle that must actually be forbidden.”1 In early modern Europe, the people who attended public executions, and claimed the right to see who was executed and how, were frequently described as aggressive, disruptive, and vengeful.2 Michel de Montaigne, who was among the first to argue against the use of torture in public punishment, declared that at times the crowd at executions could be much more cruel than the cannibal of the New World.3 Yet the unruly crowd was necessary to the sovereign’s authority over the body and imposition not only of death but also of extreme pain through cutting, quartering, and dismembering.4 In the drawing, the crowd expresses frustration and anger as it anticipates the next hanging, but the event has also become the prerogative of a much more dispassionate witness, the observer of the drawing and its meticulous display of the techniques of execution. The formation of new knowledge depended on careful visual observation, and the intersection of life and death was increasingly important to anatomical study, which attempted to acquire human bodies for research as soon as possible after execution.5 The anatomist Andreas Vesalius did not even wait for bodies to be brought down from the scaffold to pursue his research: 1

“Persons who have been hanged in summer and put on a cross as is customary in my country and in France, swell up to an enormous size within a few days after their execution as if they were bladders distended with water.”6 In the drawing, the force of bodily punishment has not ended, but attentive observation has already begun. Foucault’s well-known argument on the shift from the public spectacle of punishment to the disciplinary practices of the jail presupposes the displacement of violence in the formation of knowledge, especially in the human sciences.7 Yet while the official imposition of physical violence came under attack, it did not disappear. Instead, it was reconstituted elsewhere—for instance, in representations of travel to distant lands, where encounters with unknown people frequently turned into excessive acts of carnage. The study of anatomy, like public punishment, developed strategies to deal with increasing concerns about the visibility of physical violence, including the institution of the public anatomy lesson, which was delivered annually to a general audience, usually during Carnival, and presented an alternative to the dissections carried out privately in hospitals and universities.8 The anatomy lesson remained a highly unstable event and was, like Carnival, constantly subjected to official regulation.9 At times it served the study of anatomy, especially in relation to teaching. Yet for many anatomists, including Jacopo Berengario da Carpi and Andreas Vesalius, the public anatomy lesson was a distraction from the proper work of anatomy and did little to inform its audience and even less to advance medical knowledge.10 In this book, I examine how anatomy’s imposition of physical violence on the human body produced a new kind of image of the body. As the genesis of the anatomical image, violence became the constitutive component of a body conceived as reenacting its actual fragmentation and its imagined reconstruction. At the level of the image, this seemingly continuous narrative becomes an inversion, transforming the act of violence while retaining its memory.11 For many people, anatomy was associated with the defilement of the dead and with alarming accounts of the illicit acquisition of bodies for dissection. Scholars acknowledge that the practices of anatomy were regarded with suspicion and fear, and most assume that visual images were a means of concealing or even neutralizing these practices.12 Yet the inescapable memory of the body’s destruction became an indispensable tool precisely because it could claim the disclosure of previously unknown information about the body and simultaneously harness the energy unleashed by the force of this destruction. The anatomical image had a stake not only in the display of violence but also in the transformative power of violence. In this kind of image, the dismemberment of the body became a performance of the destruction that had already taken place. The performance itself started with the stripping of clothing at the time of punishment and continued with the penetration and removal of the skin, flesh, and fat, whether as part of punishment at the side of the scaffold or on the table of anatomical dissection. Not all images explicitly reveal the crucial link between death under the 2

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authority of the state and reconstitution through anatomical procedures, but the link is implied in the performance itself, which increasingly traced a line between the imposition of violence and the revelation of knowledge about both life and death. In the image, the unveiling of the body promises the removal of all obstructions and in the process produces forms of erasure that are presumed to stand in the way of truth: family and individual identity, geographical belonging and social standing, and even, with the denial of proper burial, the distinction between life and death. Nudity, according to Giorgio Agamben, is always experienced as a process of denudation, never as an action completed or possessed. The same may be said of the anatomical image, which enacts the process of dissection as a search for knowledge but also works to reconfigure the act of violence as a process of erasure that must be extended endlessly for truth to emerge. Agamben traces the link between denuding and knowledge to Genesis and the shift from the “theological signature” of the body’s perfection in Paradise to the exposure of the body’s ontology as human after the Fall. If Adam and Eve suddenly recognized their state of nakedness, argues Agamben, it was because the clothing granted through God’s grace had previously covered the body’s inherent state of human imperfection. But the discarding of the clothing of grace also uncovered the desire for knowledge, although to know nudity is not necessarily to have knowledge of something but rather to know “only an absence of veils, only a possibility of knowing.”13 Anatomical dissection entailed not only the total denuding of the body but also its reassemblage, a process that brought increasing attention to the body as a fabricated entity with future potential for change. As others have noted, anatomy, by producing knowledge through the act of cutting and separating body parts, presumed the reassemblage of parts that would form a new artificial body.14 The anatomical image produced bodies that existed in the interstices between annihilation and animation and oscillated between human and artificial life. On the surface, this type of image approximated the physical appearance of the human body in startling ways, especially in the case of the wax model. But resemblance did not always mean physical likeness, and it frequently concealed difference. The shift from print to wax sculpture, which also entailed a shift from printed book to a space of display, contributed to the new concern with the materiality of the body and altered the image from simulation to artificial substitute. Both print and wax sculpture introduced technological and artistic innovations that radically changed the image of the body as much as they changed the image itself. This important but neglected aspect of early modern anatomy brought into tension the replication of the human body and the attempt to exceed human limitations. I argue that the early wax model and the articulated skeleton should be regarded within a larger history of the simulation of artificial life that included the automaton. Would these new bodies return to the perfection lost in the Fall, or would they be transformed through new models—for example, antique sculpture, recently unearthed and inciting doubts about the time Introduction

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line of the Fall described in the book of Genesis? Certainly these bodies complicate the already blurred boundaries between nature, technology, and God.15 The anatomical image followed no prescribed formula for depicting the body. On the contrary, violence’s force remained unpredictable and introduced a range of yet undetermined transformative possibilities. The image, especially in its early stages, was highly experimental in relation to the needs of anatomy itself, and its incongruous components of destruction and creativity gave a remarkably wide scope to what could be produced. Considered through the lens of violence, the anatomical image reveals the extent to which the imaginative possibilities of visual representation contributed to the formation of early modern anatomical knowledge. In the many exchanges between body and violence, the anatomical image recalibrated established notions of flesh and bone and confronted questions on what exactly constituted the human body. On the one hand, arguments for the unity of embodiment held flesh and blood to be the essential life force and the experience of violence the source of pain and suffering against which the body struggled. On the other hand, new arguments for the structure of the body asserted the primacy of bone and muscle in the production of the body’s state of animation, interconnecting physical energy with new ideas of free will and self-determination. Instead of the constant process of mutation associated with embodiment itself, the body as an assemblage of parts implied a more outward direction of internal and external forces. These notions of the body, however, were never entirely separate. For an image with its genesis in the act of physical annihilation, violence was how bodily matter was tested and made to reveal its truth. Some anatomical images foreground the power of violence to change the body through destruction and reconstitution, and imagine the mechanics that would improve human animation and challenge natural mutation. Others, especially those that retain a connection to the state of embodiment, are less confident. But none could fully erase the question of pain. How do the transformations of the dissected body relate to its status as object of study, an issue rarely addressed in anatomical studies? Is this the body sacrificed rather than killed, which, according to René Girard, retains a liminal place in relation to authority’s imposition of bodily violence?16 The status of the dissected body has been ignored even though the relation between public punishment and anatomical dissection continues to be the focus of disagreement. Not all bodies used in early modern dissection had been condemned to death for criminal acts, but a decisive link was forged in the sixteenth century between the criminal body and the object of dissection, and not only because the growth of anatomical research created a new demand for corpses.17 The performance of dissection, like that of punishment, was made to strip the body of its place in the world. Anatomical practices attempted to challenge the state’s authority over the human body, even duplicating some of the rituals of public punishment. According to Cătălin Avramescu, “Once the executioner has been transformed into a public functionary, there is one other personage 4

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alone who still shares with the cannibal the domain of bodily disposal: the physician.”18 The executioner and the physician had shared persistent rumors of unspeakable bodily cruelty and were constantly paired in relation to new forms of producing pain. Reconceived as having regressed from civil to natural law, and even as having renounced natural law, the criminal was to be exiled to the lands of cannibals.19 The criminal would now become an inhabitant of the state of nature, comparable to the disruptive crowd and the savage cannibal. In these guises, people were moved outside civil law but also closer to new domains of knowledge, including disciplinary practices in prisons, ethnographic studies, and anatomy.20 Violence, as an active component in the formation of the anatomical body, challenges the scholarly tendency to separate the development of medical knowledge from the human experience of sensation, pain, and death. As with public punishment— which, according to Foucault, banked on the excesses of torture to transfer the violence of the crime onto the body of the condemned—anatomical images transformed the difficult materials and brutal practices of anatomy into a new site in which violence remains in plain sight while being contained by the promise of a recuperated future.21 I argue that violence in the anatomical image is both productive and destructive and in this respect informed the formation of new notions of the body. In comprising the potential of the body, violence was not simply that which had been imposed through anatomical procedures but also that which the body itself produced through its inner forces. I return to the drawing of the double hanging in order to reflect on how the visibility of violence is perhaps at its most persuasive when it is able to transform the moment of the now into the potential of the future. In the drawing, the practices of execution are contained within high walls, guarded by soldiers, and kept away from intrusive eyes. But the violence within holds the potential to move outward and to activate the image itself through the force of that violence. The presence of the table beside the scaffold and in front of the least secure part of the wall is intriguing, and not only because this table is used to dismember the body after execution and to display body fragments to the public at large. The table is partly outside the image, directing our attention elsewhere, perhaps to the space of the table of anatomy upon which the body of the condemned might later be dissected. The precise display of the tools and practices of hanging indicate violence deployed and controlled through rigorous procedures, yet the crowd that peers over the wall, generating an excess of emotion and anger, threatens at any moment to disrupt the logic of these procedures. Another site for the potential of violence is the image within the image, the painted tablet held in front of the man about to be dragged up the ladder. The established practice of showing images of Christ’s physical suffering to the condemned was partly an attempt to distract the person from the site of punishment and postpone the realization of imminent death. The drawing, then, holds in reserve the potential of violence to transform one thing into another, punishment into Introduction

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­ isplay, knowledge of the crime into knowledge of the body, and, of course, the livd ing into the dead. Usually dated to the end of the sixteenth century, this drawing has had two separate lives: one as witness to early modern practices of corporal punishment, the other as a manifestation of the troubled psyche of its maker, the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci.22 In the scholarly literature on corporal punishment that followed Foucault’s 1970 Discipline and Punish, the drawing makes frequent appearances, usually attesting to early practices of hanging.23 In effect, the drawing becomes witness to the method of hanging in which a rope was tied to the crossbeam of the scaffold and around a person’s neck, leaving the person, once pushed off the ladder, to suffocate for a substantial amount of time—a practice that preceded the use of the floor trap.24 We are invited to observe how the scaffold was constructed and used: vertical beams are carefully inserted into the ground and balanced by short posts, the crossbeam is nailed on one side and wedged on the other, the criminal body is marked with the crime of theft by the money bag hanging from the waist, and the condemned is comforted by a member of a religious confraternity, who shows him an image as he is forced up the ladder. Yet this scholarship, in which the drawing is treated as a viable source of evidence, remains entirely silent about how violence actually operates in the image. Turning to the history of art, the drawing has been discussed as a “snapshot” of the street unexpectedly captured by Carracci while wandering through Rome.25 The source of this story is Carracci’s seventeenth-century biographer Carlo Malvasia, who enfolds drawings like this one into a poignant account of the painter’s mental deterioration in the late 1590s, when he was in Rome working on frescoes in the Farnese family palace: “And when, because of weariness or late hour they finally left and took a stroll through the city or went outside the city gate for some fresh air, their fruitful pastime was to take note of unusual sites or chance encounters with people.”26 Scholars even mention that Carracci’s friend and doctor, Mancini, attributed the painter’s practice of drifting across the city to “an extreme melancholy accompanied by a loss of memory and speech.”27 The idea of capturing the past as a present moment is appealing: Annibale and his brother, Agostino, walking along the river suddenly encounter a scene of multiple executions by the Pont Sant’Angelo. The gallows is fully operational, as one man already hangs from the crossbeam, and another, hands tied tightly behind his back, is painfully being hauled up the ladder backward by the executioner. Anticipation mounts as a crowd gathers behind the back wall, eyes wide open and mouths agape; shouts and jeers ricochet across the inner space. Some people demand to see who the man about to die is, for his head is turned downward toward the image that a religious companion holds up to him. The crowd surges forward, but a cluster of spears projecting above the wall indicate that guards protect the most vulnerable part of the barrier, the door with a keyhole at its center. Expectations rise. Might the wall be breached and the second execution interrupted? 6

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For art historians, then, the drawing is the product of a fortuitous encounter within everyday life and keeps to a sense of the present that is compounded even by Carracci’s presumed loss of memory and language. Yet, Malvasia’s idea of capturing something on the street, conjoined as it is with a dispirited psychic state, seems less about the truth of the moment than about how something unexpected might emerge from the artist’s confused sense of space and temporality. This kind of interpretation has recently turned Carracci into a modern painter of fragmented time and space rather than the rigorous classicist he became at the hands of his seventeenth-century biographer Giovanni Bellori.28 It is difficult to ignore that the drawing does not privilege the viewing point of the crowd located on the street but rather a wide range of viewing points from the back of what seems to be an internal space. But how might one consider an image that gives the impression of a fleeting encounter yet is carefully observed, projected from different viewing points, and somehow remains not fully understood or fully digested? Malvasia’s account of Carracci’s street drawings bears an interesting relation to film theorist Siegfried Kracauer’s celebrated analysis of film’s inextricable link to the street. In the 1940s, Kracauer argued that film is at its most radical when it “clings to the surface of things,” which is to say when something is deposited in the film frame before it can be fully seen, recognized, and made meaningful. For Kracauer, this can happen when shooting is conducted on the street and the camera captures something unexpected, or when the material presence of something emerges so vividly on the surface of the screen that it detaches itself from the preconceived narrative.29 In Carracci’s drawing, the description of the surface of things is as attentive to the shape of the nail that holds the sections of the scaffold together as it is to the decisive twist of the neck of the hanged man. This lack of differentiation achieves an immediacy that implies no gap between the eye and the hand and no hierarchy between the animate and the inanimate. The strokes of the pen describe things out there—the roughly hewn wooden posts that make up the scaffold, the leather straps of the folding table—but they retain the gestures of attempting to describe but never fully achieving a fixed form. Unlike in film, the unplanned and indistinct is not a byproduct of the apparatus but instead is produced by bodily gestures that draw our attention to the constant contact between the process of observation and the lines on the paper. In effect, the material rituals of death become entangled with the attempt to give them life, and thus one thing is transformed into another by the continuous markings on the paper, regardless of how these two things might usually be distinguished from each other. Bodily contact is crucial to the drawing’s ability to make the transition of things visible, including the transition from life to death.30 In film, the close-up tends to be the most stable viewing point, usually at the service of the narrative.31 But in Carracci’s drawing, this is precisely where the narrative starts to break down. The strokes of the pen are never apart from the gesture of the hand, and thus to look closely at the strokes is to see the moment of drawing, to Introduction

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trace the uncertain paths of the line, and to consider what it might have become or what it failed to become. In effect, it opens a different time than the wide-angle view, which turns separate lines into definable objects that can be considered on their own or inserted back into a narrative. Moreover, unlike film, in which the close-up and the wide angle are imposed through editing, the drawing requires the viewer to navigate between these two distances and those in between, and to consider the coexistence of different temporalities within the same image. For the drawing to retain a semblance of the real, in the sense that Kracauer proposed for film, the narrative components must be in the process of becoming. Yet the spaces in between are no less important. In film, separate frames are spliced together, but it is the interval between the frames that produces the impression of movement from one to another or even produces an intermediate image.32 In the drawing, the spaces between episodes seem to clarify a continuous narrative. Yet these are much more than empty spaces or intervals of time in the continuity of the narrative. They generate movement in the image and raise unexpected possibilities between its constituents. One man is starting to climb up the ladder, while the other has been pushed off the same ladder to his death only recently. As if in a loop, the two bodies repeat the same action as others before and others after. We recall that the dead man too walked up the ladder backward, was pulled up by the noose around his neck by the executioner, and painfully tried to balance his body. We can foresee that the man going up the ladder will be pushed from it to swing outward and be slowly asphyxiated. The two men begin to resemble each other. Both wear only long shirts that leave their legs exposed, while their arms are tied tightly behind them. The rear view of one is completed by the front view of the other; the tension of the naked leg that bends awkwardly to climb the rungs of the ladder is released by the naked legs that point lifelessly downward; the lack of sensation in the twist of the dead man’s neck is recovered when one notices the painful pulling of the other man’s neck by the executioner. At this point, the interval disappears and the images intersect, producing the inevitable cycle of life and death. Even the tools of execution become part of this intersection. The rope strangulating one man’s neck is wound around the crossbeam and will soon be choking the other man. Of course, the head also works to separate the two men, to differentiate life and death. For the man already hanging, the tilt of the head confirms death and brings the body to its full state of visibility. This kind of visibility depends not only on the readable signs of death but also on the relationship of the body to space. While all else is lost, the man keeps his verticality, which, like the posts of the scaffold, depends on the tying, piercing, and penetrating of matter. This tilt of the head becomes a pivotal point between life and death, morphing the two heads and bodies into one and merging the sign of death (the broken neck) with the sign of internal life (the pensive head). The repetition of this pose starts to split the image, separating the transition between life and death. The viewer of the 8

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drawing does not need to become enmeshed in the emotive desire of the crowd to see what it so urgently seeks, namely, the face of the man starting the climb up the ladder. Nor does the viewer need to seek what the crowd has left behind, namely, the face of the dead. The rope keeps the man straight, and the purse that hangs from his waist only reiterates this orientation. Foucault argued that the spectacle of the scaffold threatened not only the productivity of the body but also its subjection by way of instruments that, instead of imposing pain, brought the body into the “direct, physical pitting of material force against material force.”33 For Foucault, this force was located not in a particular institution or state apparatus but in the ways in which institutions gained recourse to it. As Gilles Deleuze put it, “Violence expresses well the effect of a force on something, some object, or being. But it does not express the power relations, that is to say the relations between force and force.”34 In the drawing, the instruments of violence—the scaffold, the rope, the table—have transformed but not destroyed the hanged man, who himself becomes an instrument ready to serve the interests of observation and knowledge. In the context of dissection, it is significant that anatomists preferred the bodies of people who had been executed by hanging and were likely to be less damaged than those killed by other means.35 The hanged man’s fragile but resolute verticality is worth comparing to images from Antonio Gallonio’s 1591 Treatise on Instruments of Martyrdom, in which instruments of torture enact their full will on the condemned, twisting, bending, and crushing the body (fig. 1).36 In Carracci’s drawing, the dead man has encountered the instruments of punishment, but they have not been used to distort his physicality, at least not his verticality. The man, like the other instruments on view, has entered a realm of visibility and displays his functionality, though now imbued with faceless anonymity. He has been removed from the turmoil of urban life, literally placed aside and framed by the straight lines of the instruments, even the mannaia, a small, guillotine-like instrument that stands on the table and was used to cut limbs, especially the hands of those condemned for theft.37 In sum, all instruments perform their given task: the ladder will slide along the gallows; the legs of the table will be folded; and the body will be brought down, bent over, laid down, cut up, examined, and reconstituted into something new. In the narrative presented to the observer, the full force of violence waits to have its way with the man being taken up the ladder, but in the transition between life and death, the force of violence is already at work. The man faces toward us but his head is lowered, preventing us from having a direct encounter. He is enfolded between two figures that are moving together but pulling in opposite directions. The executioner’s upward pull by the rope evokes the need to go up in order to come down, while the companion holding an image guides the man’s attention downward, apparently to turn it beyond the world of the scaffold. A circuit of sensation is produced through this chain of bodies that tug, yank, push, and pull. Like his hanging counterpart, the man about to be hung is physically constrained, but his body seems Introduction

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Figure 1. Breaking wheel, from Antonio Gallonio, Trattato de gli instrumenti di martorio (Rome: A. and G. Donangeli, 1591), 27. Engraving. © British Library Board, 487.h.13.

more spectral, as if already detaching itself from the embodied state that has produced a confusion of inner vibrations, uneven breathing, and uncontrollable trembling. While one man has become an image of unbendable instrumentality, the other is mutating and moving toward death. Yet he still feels the tug and pull of his escorts, he hears the frenetic noise emitted by the crowd, and he sees one image of violence while being part of another. The practice of showing a person religious images, especially of Christ on the cross, as they moved toward the scaffold was widespread and had many variations in early modern Europe. Capital punishment increasingly included the participation of religious groups, especially lay confraternities, who deployed tools related to the last rites such as crucifixes and rosaries and provided a counterforce to the official executioner.38 Their presence could be controversial, and, like the crowd, they were frequently accused of instigating disruption and even conflict during the event. In Jacques Callot’s 1633 Great Miseries and Misfortunes of War, brutal scenes of public punishment include a religious representative who imposes a crucifix on the condemned man as aggressively as the executioner imposes the weapons of execution 10

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Figure 2. Criminal soldiers on the breaking wheel at a scaffold, from Jacques Callot, Great Miseries and Misfortunes of War, 1633. Etching. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

(fig. 2).39 The executioner and the religious representative share the platform with the wheel in which torture and death are combined. The condemned faces the crucifix, and when the wheel spins, he will have no choice but to face the sword. According to the regulations of the Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, its members served as companions to the condemned in Rome, and the crucifix was the main image that they offered to prisoners as they moved from the jail to the site of execution. Like the executioner, the religious companion was defined by the handling of the prisoner’s body and the deployment of instruments.40 The two functionaries were brought into close proximity at the scaffold and shared the instruments of punishment, although these also worked to draw crucial distinctions. For example, the rope used by the executioner to hang the accused became for the confraternity a kind of relic, as it was saved and ceremonially burned on the feast of the confraternity’s patron, John the Baptist.41 The ladder was the primary point of encounter and the instrument that belonged to both, although the religious representative had to yield to the executioner’s higher authority.42 Both used the sword; the executioner used it to cut up the body if torture or postmortem mutilation was required, while the religious representative used it to cut the rope around the neck and sometimes even to behead the corpse when it was collected the night after the execution. The space between scaffold and table is where the transition between life and death takes its biggest leap by moving beyond life to a state of uncertainty. The table, Introduction

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as the subsidiary site of violence, is set off at one side of the scaffold awaiting the next stage in the process, which might well include the dismemberment of the body and display of body parts. Foucault discusses the imposition of torture after death, especially the importance of the anguish of those who witnessed the mutilation of the corpse, which was considered to be the severest form of punishment, partly because it encroached on the right of burial.43 Montaigne, who witnessed an execution in Rome in 1581, was especially dismayed by the continuity of punishment after death: “After he was strangled, they cut him into four quarters. They seldom put a man to any simple death, and exercise their barbarity after he is dead. . . . The people are terrified by the severities practised upon dead bodies: for the people here, who had shown no feeling at seeing him strangled, at every blow that was given to hew him in pieces burst out into piteous cries.”44 Montaigne was bewildered by what he considered to be the spectators’ odd response, “as if everyone had lent his own sense of feeling to that carcass.”45 The effects of excessive physical violence were not, it seems, limited to the confrontation with another person’s experience of pain and death.46 For Montaigne, the continued imposition of pain before, during, and after execution was pivotal to his objection to public punishment and was the basis of his defense of the cannibal, who he claimed dismembered and ate people only after they were dead.47 Yet for those present at the scaffold, the brutal rituals of death produced a visual image of violence that superseded the image of the transition from life to death “to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign.”48 There are almost no images of this highly charged moment of violence. Perhaps this moment had to be enacted but also concealed. An exception is the image of the sixteenth-century martyr Thomas Holland in Mathias Tanner’s 1675 volume on Jesuit martyrdom (fig. 3).49 Holland is about to be drawn and quartered on a table framed by the familiar wooden structure of the scaffold. His executioners stand over him on the table, one removing the noose and another raising his hatchet, while the Jesuit lies naked and seemingly lifeless. In his state of nakedness, Holland loses his religious identity and, by becoming an anonymous body, complies with the procedure of reducing as much as possible the identity of anyone condemned to the punishment of being not only executed but also dismembered. A space that at first seemed empty now becomes filled with potential, awaiting the bodies that will be brought down from the scaffold. Legal and religious officials met at this table, and in Rome the members of the Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato were responsible for collecting and burying the dead after execution and public display.50 By the end of the sixteenth century, the lay confraternity, Florentine in origin, also had gained the right to oversee the condemned person in the journey from the top of the ladder to the shattering descent.51 It developed very strict procedural regulations and kept detailed records of who had been executed, whether the person had confessed to the crime, and the method of execution, which 12

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Figure 3. The martyrdom of Thomas Holland, from Mathias Tanner, Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis et vitae profusionem (Prague: Universitatis Carolo-Ferdinandeae, 1675), 125, plate 117. Etching. © British Library Board, 487.i.25.

was usually hanging but also often included quartering.52 The confraternity, which still has its headquarters at the edge of the Forum in Rome, renegotiated its rights and increasingly extended its privileges over the body of the condemned after execution (plate 2). An important new responsibility was administering the use of corpses in the medical school of the university of the Sapienza, including the terms of exchange.53 After the death penalty was abolished in Italy in 1889, the confraternity turned to visiting prisoners in jail and, even more recently, to providing financial support for families with relatives in jail. In Carracci’s drawing, the relation between prisoner and religious companion is different from the one represented in Callot’s print, and now revolves around their exchanges over the small painted panel known as a tavoletta (plate 3).54 This small, double-sided framed image is usually regarded as a type of confessional tool, encouraging the prisoner to acknowledge culpability for the crime in question. In accounts of the charitable works of Rome—for instance, in Camillo Fanucci’s 1601 Treatise of all the pious works of the holy city of Rome—the confraternity is praised for its use of this kind of image to verify the crime and offer the possibility of repentance.55 Yet the records of the confraternity reveal great concern with the failure to Introduction

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achieve contrition, even when the confraternity gained the right to temporarily interrupt the execution if the person confessed.56 The tavoletta has a wooden handle attached to the frame, which allows a firm grip but also flexibility for quick changes in direction and proximity. Very few tavolette survive, even fewer with their distinctive frames. The rectangular panel that appears in Carracci’s drawing was the most common. The elaboration of the frame during the sixteenth century seems to have addressed the challenge of an image used while moving on the street for long periods of time. In the late sixteenth century, triangular panels were introduced, some with smaller panels hinged to the main panel, serving to limit the prisoner’s lateral vision.57 The tavoletta covered but also brought attention to the prisoner’s face, separating it from the urban environment and at times angering those who claimed the right to see who was being executed.58 It was precisely this aspect of the practice of showing images to the condemned that intrigued Montaigne when he attended a public hanging in Rome in 1581: “There are two monks, clothed and masked in the same way, who stand by the side of the criminal in the cart; one continually holds before his face, and makes him incessantly kiss, a tablet on which is the image of Our Lord: this is done in order that the face of the criminal may not be seen as they pass along the street. At the gallows, which is a beam between two supports, they still kept this picture close before his face, till he was thrown off.”59 For Montaigne, the tavoletta becomes an instrument of agitation, pitting different participants against one another and producing a sense of increasing urgency. The rules of the confraternity required that the religious representative hold the tavoletta in such a way that the condemned could not see the scaffold and the preparations for execution.60 To quote a manual from Bologna, “keeping the tavoletta in such a way that he always has his eye on it, that is, so he always sees it.”61 Yet the tavoletta itself reveals the very environment it was supposed to mask. The themes represented in the tavoletta ensured that punishment always remained at the center of the condemned’s attention. Of the ten tavolette until recently kept in a cluttered cabinet of the confraternity meeting room, nine have a scene of Christ’s Crucifixion on one side, in keeping with the wide use of crucifixes in comforting rituals. Scenes of punishment and torture of saints on the other side of the tavoletta further reaffirm the parallel between the prisoner’s journey and Christ’s stages of the Passion.62 Physical evidence suggests that the tavoletta with the Crucifixion on one side and the lamentation of Christ on the other was the one by far most frequently used (plates 4 and 5). All the tavolette required repairs over years of grueling use, but this one was painted and repainted repeatedly, including by the Flemish painters hired by the Monastery of San Giovanni Decollato in the sixteenth century to decorate the oratory.63 Along the way it has accumulated the marks of a frantic and inescapable proximity; it has been rubbed, stroked, touched, and kissed so many times that the painted surfaces are literally covered with traces of this intense contact.64 The pur14

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suit of the intimate encounter between tavoletta and face was such that for a time there was even the promise of a papal indulgence if one kissed the tavoletta.65 Instead of something that prompts perception, interpretation, or devotion, this type of image mounted an assault on the senses: the unexpected blind twists and turns along the street, the contrast between excessive sound and limited vision, the weariness of trying and failing to adjust to the changing surroundings—all contributed to the merging of image and urban space. The Crucifixion, after all, was an official execution and was frequently considered in relation to public executions.66 The scene of lamentation is the aftermath of that execution, and in this instance it is staged within two distinct spheres. One belongs to the prisoner’s body: after many hours of hanging on the wooden structure, it has been cut down, brought down the ladder, and stretched out horizontally on the ground, its orientation due to an excess of feeling and suffering as much as to the weight of gravity. The other sphere belongs to the crowd: the scene is full of turmoil and agitation; women weep, wail, and cover their faces and turbaned men argue and gesticulate, in relation not to the spent body (as is the convention) but to the site of execution itself (plate 6). This site now becomes bewildering, no longer perceptible as urban space but as vertiginous swirls of color that twist and flow in multiple directions. The lamentation moves time back to the scaffold and the disorienting backward climb up the ladder, drawing the viewer’s attention to the unimaginable moment of reaching the top and confronting the void beyond. The prominent ladder intersects the spheres of the prisoner and the crowd, linking the upsurge of energy in the upper part of the image to its deflation in the lower part. The cross itself is only visible through a vertical post and one side of the crossbar, which turns the cross into a scaffold and brings the ladder into the foreground as the primary tool of punishment.67 But the ladder, with its stress on vertical movement, is also an instrument of transformation that suggests the body’s climb up only to be brought down to the horizontality of the spent body. Halfway down the ladder there is a man suspended between upward and downward orientations.68 With his dazzling vermilion cape, this figure galvanizes attention at the crucial point between the two directions and holds the potential for changing orientation just as the prisoner/viewer is reaching the top of the ladder. The tavoletta spills onto the empty space in the drawing between the two men at the scaffold and, instead of a gap in narrative time, it becomes the link between climbing and being thrown from the ladder. The members of the confraternity were very aware of this moment, and their regulations are especially careful about what to do once the condemned had reached the top of the ladder: “When push is given by executioner, the comforter will pass to other side of ladder, which the said afflicted has climbed, and keeping always a hand attached to one of the rungs for proper security, he will seek to maintain the tavoletta before the face of the suspended afflicted as long as he thinks the afflicted has not departed to the other life.”69 At this point, the companion was to use the tavoletta to block the view of the instruments of torture, and especially Introduction

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the executioner, and this was to be achieved while maintaining his own balance and not affecting “the tools of the master of justice.” This was difficult, and there were technical problems to overcome in order not to get in the way of the executioner but also not to make it more difficult for the prisoner: “And take care always to hold the tablet in front of his face and not too low. Go as high as you can, which will make it easier for you and so that he will be better able to understand what you tell him. And do not be there in a way that would block him when he is about to swing down, so that when he is knocked off the ladder he falls freely.”70 The empathetic bond between prisoner and companion suggested by Carracci’s drawing is important to consider in relation to how practices at the scaffold were adjusted when the confraternity became involved with the anatomy school. Instead of “the condemned,” those to be executed began to be called “patients,” and the religious companions became their “spiritual doctors.”71 There is evidence that new physiological knowledge was also taken into account. Guided by medical debates on the persistence of sensation after being deprived of oxygen, the confraternity recommended that the companion keep the tavoletta in front of the dying person’s face long after he had been pushed from the ladder.72 This required unwavering determination, as the companion had to find ways to deal with a precarious physical position while observing the state of the person as he choked and ceased to breathe. In effect, the tavoletta offers some insight into the space between the two prisoners in the drawing, a space in which the boundary between life and death disappears. There are few religious themes with more potential for reflection on one’s own death than the decapitated head of John the Baptist on a salver (plate 7). It is not coincidental that the confraternity, initially devoted to those who must confront death, adopted the beheaded John the Baptist as its patron. The traditional rendition of the decapitated head of the saint on the salver is found throughout the monastery.73 The Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato aligned its rituals with the narrative of John the Baptist’s martyrdom and thus by implication brought a considerable level of ambiguity to its practices and relation to capital punishment. Most executions in early modern Rome were carried out by hanging, but by cutting off the possibility of breath, hanging was associated with decapitation.74 In Christian theology, the image of the head of John the Baptist holds a key place in the emergence of Christ as the Son of God. In effect, John is the prophet who must erase himself in order to fulfill his prophecy.75 The severed head is crucial to his transitional status, as it shows him to be of his body and beyond his body, and becoming himself only by being separated from himself.76 Seeing himself as an image of violence marks John the Baptist’s transition, which is why the platter that holds his head frequently includes an inscription about the act of seeing oneself.77 To reflect on the tavoletta of the head of John the Baptist is to confront one’s own face at the moment of death. What would it be like to be shown the image of John the Baptist, the head severed from the body but filling the entire visual field? The 16

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image is pressed up to your face, like a mirror that cannot be evaded. Every attempt to look away only reinstates it, bringing it back in spite of your fading vision. The head seems slowly to turn in an arduous attempt to continue this painful encounter, yet blood is draining and starting to pool at the edges of the platter. The eyes, no longer open but not entirely shut, struggle to look outward, to resist the fading of sensation and keep the darkness at bay. In this transition from life to death, experienced not only in one’s own body but also as an image of violence, the tavoletta fills in the final part of the interval between life and death that in the drawing remains invisible. And what of the many eyes that have looked upon the tavoletta of John the Baptist, willingly or unwillingly, some seeking to keep the connection and others trying to look away: how do they accumulate in this space? What this image has witnessed is in many ways unthinkable, but its place in a history of images of violence is important to consider. The tavoletta is situated between comfort and violence. It was an imposition, even an aggressive imposition, but it was also a counter to the kind of time exacted by the executioner through his use of instruments. For the confraternity, the aim was to prolong time by combining distraction (from the event) and concentration (on the image). The longer this time lasted—through the readjustment of the tavoletta, the repetition of prayer, the kissing of the surface of the image—the more likely the person was to reach the equilibrium needed to achieve self-reflection and the possibility of confession. This is in contrast to the executioner, whose goal was also to extend time, but in order to display the imposition of pain. Ultimately, the tavoletta disrupts the divide between before and after in relation to life and death by showing these to be not distinctive states but states on a continuum of sensation. The tavoletta accumulates the destructive force of violence in ways that resemble the table of torture at the execution and the table of anatomical dissection. All three seek to uncover concealed knowledge, and all three entail the body’s move into horizontality (death) as the key factor in the production of knowledge. In Carracci’s image, the hanged man’s body retains its uprightness for our close observation, but it also foretells the loss of verticality. The tilt of the head leads us in that direction and signals its changing status as corpse, which is to say as mutating and deteriorating matter. The drawing signals this change through the horizontal hatching that defines the back limit of the image. The horizontal orientation, and the dispersion that it implies, has been there all along, in the back wall that separates the horizontal space of attentive observation at the front from the space of turmoil and uncertainty behind. The body’s loss of verticality is a primary concern in anatomical procedures and usually remains hidden in images of dissection. But it does appear in Andreas Vesalius’s 1543 treatise De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) within one of the illustrated letters, a site in which the troubling aspects of anatomical practice are revealed and even mocked (fig. 4).78 The letter L exposes the secretive collection of corpses from the scaffold at night by religious representatives, who Introduction

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Figure 4. Illustrated letter L (man cut down from scaffold), from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 1, chap. 13, p. 55. Woodcut. c British Library Board, c54.k.12.

huddle and stare from inside their hooded masks as the body is cut down. No longer supported by the instruments of punishment, the body’s dead weight pulls it down, rendering it unwieldy and formless. In this state, there is no memory of having climbed upward and no possibility of the contemplative horizontality granted to Christ after being brought down from the cross. Instead, the body is a corpse, suspended as if on four limbs, with a mane of hair covering the face, transformed into the state of natural law. The Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato developed many regulations for the bodies collected for burial and even more for those that it turned over to the university.79 The university kept bodies for five to ten days, and a large percentage of any one body, including every part that had been dissected, had to be returned in order to comply with burial practices. The confraternity was obligated to protect the family of the condemned and thus the regulations state that all transactions were to be conducted at night, and even that members of San Giovanni Decollato should remove the head of the corpse before submitting it for dissection. It is unclear how closely this regulation was followed, but the equipment they brought to the execution certainly included a sword for decapitation. In Rome, state regulations did not 18

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specify that the person whose body was dissected had to be a foreigner, as was the usual practice elsewhere, and although most were, there was considerable worry about the recognition of someone designated for medical dissection.80 While many anatomical dissections in Rome were carried out in hospitals, research at the university had to follow Roman statutes, which stated that those dissected, including in the annual public anatomical demonstration, had to have been condemned to death and turned over by the governor or a senator.81 Sometimes physicians would come to the place of execution, select a body in relation to their needs, and submit a receipt.82 And there are instances when civic authorities bypassed the rights of the confraternity and designated dissection as a means to negotiate the punishment of a favored citizen. Rodolfo di Bernabeo, who was hanged with three companions in 1587, was, on the order of the governor of Rome, “given to the scholars at La Sapienza for them to perform an anatomy lesson” instead of being quartered in public like the others.83 The move of the corpse to the horizontality of the table is not revealed in Carracci’s drawing, since death is observed through the verticality and anonymity produced by the instruments of punishment. And it is rarely made explicit in the anatomical image, which transposes the accumulation of violence at the dissection table into an image of knowledge. One celebrated exception appears in the frontispiece of Vesalius’s treatise, which, as Andrea Carlino has argued, offers a rare glimpse of the use of the cadaver in anatomical practice before it was turned into images of knowledge.84 By the time Carracci produced his drawing of the execution, Vesalius’s treatise had been in circulation for more than fifty years, and its images of bodily dissection had acquired the status of a prototype, which it would continue to have well into the eighteenth century.85 Yet this would seem an unlikely source from which to access the imposition of violence that the drawing suppresses. As I argue in this book, Vesalius’s images do not avoid violence, but they always assert the productivity of its effects. At the center of a large and tumultuous audience, Vesalius conducts a public anatomy lesson on a corpse (fig. 5).86 The agitated gathering resembles Carracci’s crowd, full of expectation and apprehension at the possibility of seeing something that is usually prohibited. The setting is a temporary scaffold, before the anatomy theater in Padua was built in 1594 and before the university regularized public ­anatomical lessons.87 Observers and participants—the barbers who would have done most of the cutting of the body, the assistants who dealt with the bucket of viscera removed from the corpse, and Vesalius, who has his right hand inside the corpse’s abdomen and holds a retractor with his forefinger—are not separated as in Carracci’s drawing, thus making the proximity between observers and corpse not only uncomfortable but disturbing.88 By contrast, the 1651 engraving commemorating Padua’s new anatomical theater represents an elliptical structure that reduces all elements to facilitate unimpeded observation (fig. 6).89 The theater was designed to physically separate the onlookers from the physicians and their assistants and to Introduction

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Figure 5. Public anatomy lesson, detail of frontispiece, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543). Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

limit the disruptive movement and noisy quarrels of students. In the image, the experience becomes entirely disembodied, imagining the theater structure itself as an eye that orders the space and constrains the body on the table to the exacting demands of observation.90 Vesalius’s frontispiece, with its object of investigation laid out haphazardly, as likely to slip out of place on the table as to press flesh with living bodies, leaves little space for concentrated observation. The corpse on display in Vesalius’s frontispiece is physically unstable, besieged by the surging crowd, exposed from the bottom up, fully disemboweled, and female. If the face of the dead in Carracci’s drawing is kept from the observer, Vesalius’s frontispiece has no such qualms, projecting the face so insistently that it seems as if the dead eyes still stare back. The incongruity of an image of a totally obliterated body in Vesalius’s treatise has been largely ignored—until, that is, Katharine Park, in her work on women in early modern anatomy and medicine, unsuccessfully tried to 20

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Figure 6. Padua Anatomy Theater, from J. Tomasini, Theatrum anatomicum Lycei Patavini, 1654. Engraving. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

learn the identity of the woman in question.91 Vesalius himself writes that the woman was executed by hanging in Padua in the winter of 1541.92 He explains that she attempted to forestall her execution by claiming to be pregnant. A midwife testified to the contrary, and she was not only hanged but sent for dissection to the anatomy school, in part to confirm the legal judgment. Vesalius boasts that his public dissection of the woman accomplished just that and also revealed that she had given birth to a number of children. The table once again has done double duty, producing both the demise of the body, which has literally been deprived of its insides, and medical and legal knowledge. Park argues that Vesalius sought to appropriate the history of women’s knowledge about reproduction. In his treatise, the female body appears only in relation to reproduction, which is precisely what this particular body was said to lack. Yet of the four female figures in the treatise, three are, according to Vesalius, based on the dissection of this woman.93 What the image reveals instead is the imposition of violence beyond what is strictly necessary in the service of anatomical knowledge. Violence retains its inherent ambivalence, and, to quote Jean-Luc Nancy, violence does not “transform what it assaults; rather it takes away its form and meaning. It makes it into nothing other than a sign of its own rage.”94 It would seem that this particular body, with its particular history, could become only surplus matter, but it also retains the memory of the woman’s refusal to climb up the ladder and, by implication, to become an object of observation. Introduction

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Figure 7. Vivisection table, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 2, chap. 7, p. 237. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

At the table, the human body was at the threshold of change and at the extreme point of obliteration. The transition from table to anatomical image always entailed the attempt to negotiate the site of violence. It is all the more intriguing that in Vesalius’s treatise, the only image of the dissection table is declared to be the table designed specifically for vivisection (fig. 7).95 The table has a double surface, allowing for a set of metal rings and holes through which rope was threaded in order to tie down a resisting body.96 At this table, it is the instruments of dissection that have replaced those bodies. It recalls Carracci’s table, which initially may seem empty but upon closer inspection reveals the guillotine-like mannaia used to cut off the hands of thieves. The instruments on Vesalius’s table are flamboyantly displayed, ready for use and imbued with energy. The accompanying description explains that they are without exception tools used in crafts and everyday life to manipulate and transform 22

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matter. The instruments that perforate bone are used by shoemakers to pierce leather, the knives and forks that cut flesh are used in the kitchen to prepare food, the small knives that scrape muscle are used to cut feathers into quill pens, and the needles that perforate the nerves are used for sewing.97 As Elizabeth Hallam writes, these tools privilege knowledge acquired by working with one’s hands and require skillful handling.98 The relationship forged between the investigator and the object of investigation is not that of observer to observed, for it presumes a much more intimate encounter that cannot be separated from bodily sensation and physical interaction. The vivisection table is itself a tool, constructed to bring into close contact the increasing force of two living entities that are able to move and to feel. The practices of vivisection are frequently underestimated or purposely understated in the scholarly literature, but early modern anatomists are very candid about this practice, which nonetheless remained highly controversial and the focus of much fear.99 Vesalius himself argues forcefully and repeatedly for the importance of generating extreme sensation in the context of anatomical research, and he loads his specific instructions on how to tie animals down with the prospect of imminent danger to the anatomist. Access to a struggling animal seems to entail the exposure of the most vulnerable parts of the body within a face-to-face encounter: “Take particular thought for upper jaw so it is firmly attached to the plank. . . . Immobilize the head while letting the animal breathe and squeal freely.”100 Scholars have noted that Vesalius does not hide the unpleasant or illicit aspects of his work and instead boasts about its risks and challenges.101 Nothing excited Vesalius more than touching with his own hands a human heart that was still beating. In his treatise, he boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of the heart of a man who had just been executed. The comment appears, not by chance, near an unusual woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows, punished for unknown reasons, wearing his humble street clothes, and experiencing excruciating pain (fig. 8).102 This image is so unlike others in Vesalius’s treatise that it seems to demand an explanation. Is it perhaps, like Carracci’s drawing, the result of another so-called unexpected encounter on the street? Vesalius explains that he was eager to find out whether the wrappings of the heart contained water while its owner was still alive, a controversial issue given the belief that water is found in the dead because the spirit is converted into water at death.103 Vesalius was constantly on the lookout for research opportunities. “One man,” he writes, “whose heart we watched being taken out at Bologna, while he was alive, was also seen to have water in the wrapping; but it was not exactly convenient for us to make an examination, even though we joined those witnessing the tragedy.”104 Katharine Park notes that the prospect of human vivisection led anatomists to the sites of public execution, as it sometimes happened that hanged bodies would revive or that people condemned to execution were given to anatomists directly from prison, even with the person’s Introduction

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agreement.105 As it turned out, Vesalius wrote, after attending an execution in Padua, “we arranged to have a heart still beating brought into a nearby Pharmacist’s shop along with the lung and other viscera as soon as they had been removed, from those whom they cut into four parts while living and we found a quantity of water in the wrapping.”106 Whether Vesalius performed experiments on living human bodies remains a question of debate, but this kind of procedure resembled vivisection in the need to catch the moment between life and death. And it is worth noting that many of Vesalius’s accounts of his efforts to pursue knowledge regardless of the means are usually carried out through the joint efforts of those in charge of punishment and the anatomist. Vesalius, while refusing to comment on the issue of the conversion of the spirit into water, managed to make his medical point by showing that the heart of this still living body held water. In this remarkable woodcut, the proximity of life to the moment of dissection is unprecedented. The body is set against the blank page, detached from any setting, but its viewpoint, frontal and slightly from below, suggests that he is hanging at the scaffold. From this point of observation, every detail becomes conjoined in the explosive moment of death. The man’s body is held in a tight close-up as it implodes from within when suddenly deprived of oxygen. The breeches have come undone. Button holes and ties dangle, revealing a naked stomach, pubic hair, and, most unusually, the pouch in which his genitalia were restrained to prevent ejaculation at the moment of the body’s total loss of control. The man’s arms are tied tightly behind him, as was the practice in hanging, constraining the body’s own external animation but also intensifying the buildup of energy within. The buildup of force occurs in tandem with its unleashing; the rupture of what is external to the body, such as the breeches that pop open, combine with internal effects. The lungs are split apart; ribs twist back while the ribcage flaps backward and becomes entangled with the rope. In the treatise, the description of the image stresses the stripping of matter through dissection: “the rib cartilages have been freed from their bones and the bones broken outwards. Finally we have freed the pectoral bone and the cartilages attached to it from the membranes on each side that divide the thorax and raised them up to reveal their inner surface.”107 The “freeing” of the body from its interior parts through the work of dissection seems to echo its “freeing” from its street clothes at the moment of implosion. Within this seemingly spare image of bodily destruction is the entire performance of denuding that has transformed the stripped body into knowledge, or at least into the search for knowledge. The image simultaneously stages the body’s lifelikeness and its brutal destruction, suggesting the importance of the close proximity of the living body to the act of dissection in the early modern formation of anatomical knowledge. The woodcut, a printing technology that offers clarity and agility of line, reproduces the body both in its impending annihilation and its impulse to move and thrive. As an image in the midst of violent change, it generates interest in the body’s physicality and especially 24

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Figure 8. Thoracic cavity, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 6, second figure. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

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in the transposition of this materiality into that of the image. But violence’s unpredictable force also elicits concern with intense sensation, producing contradictions between the incentive to observe the body’s components and the urge to empathize with the person under dissection (and at the moment of execution). Yet if this image, like many early images of anatomy, tends to reveal the experience of pain, this is not simply due to a purposeful eliciting of empathy. Violence does not allow the experience of pain to go unnoticed, but it also opens up the possibilities of experimentation that result in the unexpected. The most unexpected aspect of the image is how it makes the internal implosion readable on the surface of the face, which twists with a grimace of pain that is difficult to behold but impossible to ignore. It doubles the intensity of sensation incurred in the making of anatomical knowledge. And it inserts itself in Carracci’s drawing between the image of the hanged man and the dissection table, filling in a level of intimacy that the drawing could not show. The rope around the neck, and the force of its pull upward, takes us up the ladder to the moment of being pushed off, a moment that has just happened and that we now confront through its bodily effects. If the tavoletta of Saint John the Baptist extends the moment of death by suspending time, this image unleashes the suddenness of violent destruction. It reveals what it might be like to see from the perspective of the crowd, but in the form of a view the crowd has left behind. This is a recollection image, one that fills in what in the drawing remains an interval but may still, owing to its own strategies, prevent the interval from turning back into a discrete moment in the narrative. Once again we encounter the tilt of the head, but now it is due to the pure and uncontrollable force of violence. The head rears back, the cheeks twitch, the mouth opens, and the tongue protrudes as the man gasps and chokes. The man’s loss of control of his tongue is perhaps the most disturbing sign of what violence has wrought. The tongue enables speech, and its distortion indicates the loss of communication and the distinctiveness of the human being.108 In its function as a tool for medical study, the image illustrates the respiratory system in relation to the heart, but as an image of violence, it does not stick to this goal. The body destroyed beyond the necessity of knowledge is found in an image within a celebrated anatomical treatise, where we might not expect it but where it hovers, ready to proclaim a new and fearless form of knowledge. The image remains unique in Vesalius’s treatise, its implications fully realized only when it returns to the space of the drawing, which is to say to the workings of the scaffold within urban life. While the image offers an unflinching confrontation with the effects of the forces of punishment and dissection, it also suggests that extreme forms of violence do not always render their object “defaced” and anonymous.109 This is not an uncomplicated recollection of the violence of death in the process of anatomical dissection precisely because it remains so emphatically in the now and for this reason seems to block a future beyond the moment of death. The 26

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figure operates within its liminal status between punishment and dissection, between the authority of the state and that of medical research, but it also returns to the crowd. The man is not anonymous in that he remains of the street, in the now; and while violence has imposed itself on the body, it has not erased the presence of a person by becoming its own image. This presence—a conflation of two moments of extreme pain—arrests any sense that it will continue to become knowledge without defiance. Instead, it is firmly located in a deep interiority of the body, in the force of violence that emanates from within.

Violence and the Image of Anatomy “The observance of bodies killed by violence, attention to wounded men, and the many diseases, the various ways of putting criminals to death, the funeral ceremonies, and a variety of such things . . . have shewn men, every day, more and more of themselves.”110 How did knowledge of the body become a framework within which to understand the world and ourselves? William Hunter’s observation, made in a 1784 lecture on anatomy, suggests that this knowledge was prompted by the confrontation with procedures for imposing violence on the human body. His statement may seem like a random list of practices pertaining to the body’s fragility, but I will argue that it is just such diverse encounters with violence that inform the formation of the anatomical image. Anatomical knowledge gained a new footing in early modern Europe by bringing together procedures for dismantling the body and close observation of its fragments. In the sixteenth century, anatomy was established as an indispensable part of university education, and its invasive approach, although by no means turned into a coherent methodology, started to raise questions about received knowledge and to project new possibilities for the body.111 The concepts of the body forged through anatomy, from knowledge about its mechanisms to an awareness of its political potential, quickly entered other forms of new knowledge, especially those pertaining to an expanding world. Not only did encounters with people previously unknown to Europeans disturb biblical accounts of creation; they also generated interest in the human body outside established European parameters. The question of authority over the body, in transition between the state and the medical profession, also entered into European claims over the bodies of people in distant territories. In images of the New World, European national rivals often contested claims to ownership and control, and it is precisely in images that critique the imposition of violence on Indigenous communities that the most extreme displays of physical force are frequently found—and without the usual transformative possibilities. Foucault located this level of physical brutality in early modern institutional and political authority, arguing for the value that the excess of bodily pain offered kings but also for a reciprocal exchange in which the state and the condemned colluded with each other. After Foucault’s 1972 Discipline and Punish associated the Introduction

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torture and disciplining of the body with the modern state, anatomical violence was linked to official punishment. Andrea Carlino, for example, has mined Italian archives for evidence that state punishment and anatomical dissection were often linked, as were rituals of the scaffold and rituals of the annual anatomical lesson. Katharine Park challenged the established idea that postmortem investigation of the body started in the Renaissance and was invariably linked to forms of state punishment.112 The shift from punishment to self-punishment (or from critique to selfcritique that is at work in images of the New World) has not been considered in relation to anatomy, even though the many images of self-dissection would suggest an interesting opening to the question of collusion that in Foucault’s argument leads to the docile body. And this perspective is particularly relevant to a consideration of violence produced within the body itself. It is by shifting the view of the anatomical image from medical goals to questions of violence that the relation between the dissected body and the forces of dissection can be further investigated. A key aspect of the shifting status of the anatomical image is the increasingly close relationship between anatomy and the institutions of print publishing, as Carlino has shown. Instead of seeing the image as a direct record of medical endeavors, Carlino initiated a more complicated understanding of the different interests that intersect in the making of the anatomical image. An opportunity to consider anatomical images from a new perspective was also opened up by recent interest in the association of violence and the formation of subjectivity, which has been largely located in the intervention of visual images. The anonymity of those subjected to dissection, like the anonymity of those executed, has begun to be questioned. In Secrets of Women, Katharine Park was the first to probe the appearance of a woman in the celebrated frontispiece of Vesalius’s treatise. While this frontispiece is widely discussed in the scholarly literature, it is odd that the brutal treatment inflicted upon the woman had not been considered before, especially as Vesalius himself comments on it. Indeed, it is on the rare occasion in which the subjectivity of the person under dissection can be accessed—for instance, in studies of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp—that scholars come closest to considering how violence permeates both practices and images of anatomy.113 Even recent attempts to bring ethical considerations to the study of early modern medical research have underestimated how violence underlies the anatomical image. Violence literally changed conceptions of the body. The anatomical image, as an image at the brink of violent change, intensified interest in the body’s materiality, specifically in the properties of bone, muscle, flesh, and blood. In part this was facilitated by their transposition to the materiality of the image, whether the pressed paper and ink of a print, or the wax, color pigments, and human materials of the wax model. Initially, woodcuts and engravings reproduced the body both in its impending annihilation and in its impulse to move and thrive. Later, wax sculpture approximated the living body even more closely, with its uncanny simulation of bodily 28

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materials and use of actual human matter, especially bone. But violence’s unpredictable force complicated things by eliciting concern with bodily sensation and with the presence of pain and suffering within the image of knowledge. According to Montaigne, who argued for the courage that it takes in the face of death, all living creatures, human and nonhuman, fear pain, especially because the imagination, “anticipating death, gives us a more lively sense of pain.”114 This idea that the image of bodily violence heightens the sensation of pain bears some resemblance to JeanLuc Nancy’s argument that violence “always makes an image of itself, and the image is what, of itself, presses out ahead of itself and authorizes itself.” According to Nancy, violence is linked to the image in that it needs to imprint itself on the thing assaulted, and the image, which operates not as an imitation of something but as its rival for presence, offers this imprint as something that becomes the subject of the image.115 In this book, I use the term image to refer to specific examples of both printed images and wax models, but I also argue for a concept of the anatomical image as one in which subjectivity is transferred to the act of violence. Too often, the anatomical image is taken to be an image of the human body like any other, complete and self-contained. The image of violence, however, puts pressure on the force through which fragmentation transforms and reforms the body unexpectedly. In effect, this is an image always in process, always engaged with the physical force imposed on itself. The participation of the observer is an unpredictable component in the performance enacted by the anatomical image, although as the image was physically revised through reproductive visual technologies, one can discern instances in which ambiguities are clarified and new possibilities are tried out. Some of these revisions had to do with reasserting the image’s adherence to biblical Genesis, especially the fixing of distinctions between the pre- and post-Fall body. Others had to do with the uncertainty of the boundaries between the memory of violence and the curbing of that memory through transformative potential. Images press at the limits of what could be given visual form while encouraging the observer’s desire to see more. As with public punishment, in which excessive suffering could turn the sovereign into a bloodthirsty tyrant and insufficient suffering could undermine his authority, the anatomical image negotiated its level of violence in relation to other images.116 In this exchange of possibilities, images of violence cannot be limited to those within medical research, and thus I consider how the anatomical image is ­constantly in dialogue with other images of bodily violence—public punishment, cannibalism, martyrdom—in order to understand how violence unfolds through the constant making and remaking of the image, not only by makers but also by users. It is worth reiterating that instead of presuming a preestablished definition of what constitutes the violence of the image, I explore how violence and its effects emerge from its relationship to concepts of the human body, the material formats through which it is imaged, and the experience of viewing these images. Introduction

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Book Outline The first two chapters of the book address the formation of the anatomical image in relation to the technology of print. It is with the printed image that a more fragmented form of embodiment came into prominence, and I start, in chapter 1, by considering the implications of the new frontispiece designed for the first Italian edition of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (published in Venice in 1604 under the title Anatomia), in which anatomical fragments from diverse sources are sutured together into a new whole. How did anatomical prints produce the concept of the body as an assemblage with as yet unknown possibilities? The force of muscles and the agility of bones take precedence, especially after the 1543 publication of Vesalius’s treatise. That treatise, and particularly its remarkable set of woodcuts, argues for the body’s future potential through the defleshing of the body, enabling the surface of the muscles and the structure of the bones to be revealed and even bolstered by the removal of all ephemeral and unclassifiable bodily matter. A body increasingly directed by its own self-propelled energy and animation undermined the very concept of flesh so crucial to received notions of embodied experience and sensation. But the body was not neutral matter open to medical reclassification, and this was especially true of the bones, which carried biblical associations with death as punishment for human sin. Vesalius’s woodcuts draw on many inventive strategies to pursue the concept of the body as assemblage but also to challenge biblical notions of origins in order to accommodate new findings about the body. Other anatomical treatises challenged Vesalius’s radical interpretation of the body, not by rejecting it but by considering its implications for the body’s mutability, especially for its unpredictable flesh. In chapter 2, I consider how Juan de Valverde de Amusco’s 1556 Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (History of the Composition of the Human Body) takes up the new paradigm offered by Vesalius’s treatise but challenges its tendency to displace embodied experience. Valverde’s treatise remains misunderstood, both in its relation to Vesalius’s treatise and in its contribution to sixteenth-century anatomical knowledge. Valverde’s ­treatise, available shortly after Vesalius’s own, reworks the latter’s woodcuts into engravings, producing an image that only emerges between the two. Valverde’s engravings restore the experience of bodily sensation, drawing on the destructive power of violence to assert not only the body’s fragility but also its continual process of remaking itself, even in and beyond death. I argue that Valverde’s response to Vesalius’s images is innovative, especially as it pertains to Vesalius’s deployment of antique sculpture, applying concepts of restoration to bring back layers of skin, flesh, and fat removed from the body even before the dissection in Vesalius’s treatise begins. This restoration entails testing out a variety of doubles for a body that, through dissection, approaches the very edge of extinction. The application of animal skins and Roman military effigies counter anatomy’s extreme process of denuding with other violent substitutes. 30

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The subject of cannibalism in a book on the anatomical image may be unexpected, but in chapter 3 I examine the question of bodily violence in an arena in which it would thrive. The construction of the cannibal did not simply offer the opportunity to stage an unprecedented level of violence that was increasingly unacceptable in the context of European public punishment; it also generated analogical thinking about the imposition of violence, especially within the expanding geographies of European economic and missionary activity. While the cannibal implies difference, it was only a surface difference, as it tended to forge links between Europe and its others and move back and forth from New to Old World. The cannibal became the anatomical body’s troubling double, and together they formed a curious pair, relocated by natural law to distant uninhabited lands, never straying too far from each other in the wider political arena. Both shared anatomy’s focus on fragmentation and reconstruction. But the cannibal’s promiscuous formation as a performer in the theater of violence was not simply “European”; it was the product of a cultural exchange that also challenged European notions of the body by bringing together the external imposition of violence with internal processes of digestion and indigestion. Instead of regarding the cannibal as an identity located in the Tupinamba communities of Brazil, I propose that its powerful effects came precisely from the inability to be situated within any one cultural context. This middle chapter is intended to provide a bridge between the first two and the last two chapters of the book, as the mirroring effect of the cannibal links not just the cannibal and the anatomical body but also printed images and wax models. At the center of this chapter is the ambivalent status of the head, which appears throughout the book. Rejected in Vesalius’s treatise for its power over the observer, the head was also shunned by the cannibal for being indigestible, mocked by ­Protestants for its use as a relic, and appropriated by the Tupinamba to deflect European intrusion. The head also brought new opportunities, especially in relation to new forms of knowledge and cross-cultural exchange. The transportation to Brazil of relics of Saint Ursula’s virgins by the Jesuits offers a striking case in which Catholic skull relics and Tupinamba ancestor skulls made room for more than one system of belief. In Europe, meanwhile, when skulls and other bones shipped from Asia and the Americas were not recognized by church officials in Rome, they were relocated to anatomical and ethnographic cabinets, where established classifications started to break down. In chapters 4 and 5, I turn from the printed image to the anatomical wax model and consider how new modes of production and display within public cabinets altered the anatomical image. I start, in chapter 4, with what is probably the earliest wax model, Gaetano Zumbo’s late seventeenth-century head, which is unprecedented in confronting the viewer with the effects of violence, revealing the suffering of the person through the nuances of a face both brutally cut and in the process of decomposing. A composite of human and artificial matter, this model Introduction

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does not merely replicate the body but becomes a lifelike substitute. Not coincidentally, it confronts the head, and in particular the relationship between face and brain, the former impossible to separate from close proximity to physical suffering, the latter difficult to bring into full visibility as bodily matter. The three-dimensional model and its mode of display presented viewers with new challenges, especially the contrast between the face and its opposite side, in which an actual human cranium, cut as prescribed by anatomical practice, reveals the brain. In Anna Morandi Manzolini’s wax self-portrait, displayed at the center of her cabinet of wax models in Bologna, the face and brain are also juxtaposed, bringing into proximity the remarkable simulation of Morandi’s facial appearance and elegant attire with the abject anonymous cranium, cut to reveal the overflow of brain matter. Violence would now transform not the person but the body’s materiality and would bring new kinds of differentiations for the body: artificial and embodied, mechanical and volatile, female and male. Chapter 5 takes up the first full-scale anatomy cabinet of wax models, installed in the 1740s in Bologna’s Institute of Sciences and consisting of life-size replicas of a man and woman engaged in an elaborate performance of bodily dissection. The performance is one of departure, denuding, and differentiation. The departure of Adam and Eve from Paradise overlaps with another departure, the separation of the two wax models as they enact different forms of embodiment. In the case of the female model, the memory of violence is embedded both in the Genesis narrative and in anatomical practice, bringing into display a body that must suffer, age, deteriorate, and die. The violence that is the experience of a body under constant mutation and deterioration is considered not only by the making of the sculpture but also by its afterlife and its problematic current state of conservation. In the case of the male model, the body is linked to the other wax figures in the process of dissection, which together carry out a performance of denuding from skin to bone, energized through the process of being cut into parts. Are these figures Adam and Eve, or are they anatomical performers who carry the memory of the biblical pair? I argue that it is the slippage between past and future identities that counts. The female figure, rendered in a new technique of layering colored wax that activates a remarkable sense of presence, is set apart from the male figures, which are reduced to bones and muscles and reach for artificial life. Does the desire to be human counter the sudden realization that she too has bone hidden within her, a component that becomes of great interest to seventeenth-century medical discussions on technological innovation and surgical skill? Not coincidentally, recent futuristic sci-fi films (e.g., Ex Machina, 2014) have turned to early modern interpretations of the creation of Eve to imagine the contradictions between the violence of being human and the violence produced in the search for prelapsarian perfection. In the scholarly literature, the imagery of Adam and Eve has been attributed, all too expediently, to the need for moralizing gestures in relation to the controversies 32

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raised by new medical practices. Yet the relation of anatomy to Genesis is much more complicated. The encounter of Old and New Worlds raised questions about human origins and challenged the very ontology of the human body. In anatomical imagery, the biblical couple appear and disappear, separate and come together, oscillate between Adam and Eve and the more ambivalent and capacious “man” and “woman.” Chapter 5 proposes that early modern interpretations of Eve—unlike misogynist interpretations that have subsequently become entrenched—argue for Eve as the primary placeholder for the uncertain future of the human.

Introduction

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Chapter 1

Bodily Animation Bones, Skulls, and Skeletons

I

n 1604, a new edition of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica was published in Venice under a new title (Anatomia) and with a new title page that tied together what had previously been pulled apart (fig. 9).1 Published by the sons of Francesco Franceschi, who fifteen years earlier had produced the first edition of the treatise to appear in Italy, the 1604 edition introduced a frontispiece by the Bolognese printmaker Francesco Valegio that staged anatomy’s aggressive fragmentation of the body, only to propose a new kind of reunified assemblage.2 Andrea Carlino argues that in early modern anatomical treatises, the frontispiece exposes what the treatise and its account of anatomy could not—namely, the presence of a cadaver brutally torn apart that stands outside sanctioned medical protocol—and “opens the book, yet stays outside of it.”3 This is the case with Vesalius’s first edition of 1543, which within the book represents the human body as a mechanism of discrete parts that function as a coherent living body, and on the frontispiece as disemboweled, dead, and in the context of a public anatomy lesson (fig. 5).4 The 1604 edition also opens with an image that the treatise itself would disallow, but in this case it is the conjoining of what the 1543 treatise had separated, starting with Vesalius himself, who in 1543 appears as unrivaled teacher and practitioner and in 1604 as part of a shared professional endeavor. The 1604 frontispiece uses the familiar format of a triumphal arch within which diverse figures and images are distributed, each demanding attention in relation to the others. Perhaps most striking are the unusual garlandlike hangings composed of severed body parts tied together by ribbons that form a continuum along the sides of the architectural structure. While the body parts are consistent with Vesalius’s conception of the human body as vertical in orientation and divided between muscular elongated limbs and clean upright bones, they follow no particular bodily sequence. The specific bones and limbs that form the garlands appear in Vesalius’s treatise, but in the frontispiece they disregard the relation of the part to the whole.5 In the treatise, body parts are displayed only once the structure of the body is established, and the coherence of the body remains clear, even as its layers are removed.6 The arbitrary linkages between parts in the 1604 edition, however, imply an experimental approach and suggest the potential of the dissected body to be reassembled into a new whole. The suturing of fragments does not end with the garlands, which are tied to leatherlike scrolls that curve, twist, and are tied to two living creatures—monkey and pig—reclining on the pediment. Each animal lowers one of its back legs to take hold of another garland, upon which skulls and other bones are suspended in decorative clusters. The bone garlands surmount the barrel vault, meeting at the center of the broken pediment, where they are tied together with a big knot around a plinth that supports a skull. Knots, loops, and twists now connect the animate and inanimate, the living and dead, the human and nonhuman, the organic and fabricated, and all are required to adjust to new interconnections. 35

Figure 9. Frontispiece from Andreas Vesalius, Anatomia (Venice: Ioan Anton et Iacobum de Franciscis, 1604). Engraving. © British Library Board, 548.m11.

Yet there is more to the frontispiece than ornamental ingenuity. While severed limbs forge an uninterrupted continuum around the triumphal arch, the niches within the arch display an emphatic absence of limbs. On the two niches of the upper level, legless male figures actively enact the dissection of their own torsos. Architectural 36

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volutes replace the severed legs and mimic their shape while serving as architectural devices that repeat the scrolls used to bring things together. On the lower level, the two niches are occupied by female figures that display their dissected abdomens and uteruses yet also manage to resemble fragmented antique sculptures. The fractured stone restates the condition of the body, but it also becomes part of the sculptural decoration of the architectural niche. Only the middle level of the arch has figures that extend their limbs or use them to hold instruments. As if to reassert their high rank, each of the figures is surmounted by one of Vesalius’s dissected heads, which replace the keystone of the niche and underscore the head’s place as the highest point of the body. Reduced to bones and muscles, these are the figures found within Vesalius’s treatise, where they perform their function of supporting and animating the body. In this respect, they are different from those without appendages, which not only display organs of digestion that cannot enact their function but also are not from Vesalius’s treatise, at least not in the state in which they appear in the 1604 frontispiece. They are, in fact, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco’s 1556 treatise Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano, in which Vesalius’s innovative deployment of the Belvedere Torso as a frame for organs that lack bodily support was radically altered. The figures on the upper level have been partly restored, covered with human and animal skins and shown participating in their own dissection, while the ones on the lower level retain the idea of the antique torso but are transformed into living bodies. Whether as hybrid creatures or as living sculpture, they have now come to life and look to those in their vicinity. The very lack of limbs suggests not passivity but mounting energy. Both female and male bodies are now engaged in forming anatomical knowledge, reaching out of their niches to communicate with one another. Even Vesalius’s two prototypes displaying bone and muscle are no longer autonomous and, taken out of their place in the sequence of dissection, start to pursue other circuits. The figure of the muscles on the left extends his arm to reach the hand of the severed arm hanging from the garland and simultaneously catches the attention of the figure above, which in contrast to the flayed figure of the muscles has been covered with animal skin. The skeleton on the right may initially appear to reiterate the static masklike skull at the top of the triumphal arch, but its articulated bones and proximity to the hanging spine give new life to a figure that now seems ready to step out of its niche. In the 1604 frontispiece, the body is not merely divided into fragments; it is also reassembled. Why was fragmentation the condition for the making of a new body? Joan Landes has argued that, for anatomy, the very act of cutting and separating body parts projects a changing body and the emergence of artificial life.7 The reassemblage of the body also evokes the artifice of the new body—for example, in Vesalius’s images of the viscera framed within the Belvedere Torso, which maintain imperfect boundaries between the marble and the flesh. According to Glenn Harcourt, this framing of the body’s internal parts serves to conceal the violence of dissection, but I believe that the force of violence was crucial to the reassemblage of the B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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body.8 Images of the cannibal, which are attentive to the lack of fit between the body eating and the body eaten, also convey an unnatural body, an issue to which I return in chapter 3. In the 1604 frontispiece, as in the anatomical image, the implication is of bodies that gain energy in the struggle to fend off destruction through cutting and separation. Cut flesh holds the memory of physical violence, and the torn limb—a visual device used in early modern representations of the brutality of the New World cannibal—recalls the force required not only to tear the body apart but also to reintegrate it. In Valverde’s revision of Vesalius’s images of the viscera, the question of the imperfect new assemblage is complicated by the attempt to return the anatomical body to a state of embodiment and its commitment to the importance of flesh and blood. Confronted with the violence of dissection, this kind of embodiment is vulnerable rather than forceful and susceptible to physical sensation, especially pain. Not that this experiential body is without the means to produce a new version of itself through anatomical dissection. On the contrary, it is in another kind of encounter with violence that Valverde’s anatomical images test out new substitutes and alternatives for the body under threat. The fragmentation of the body had long been part of anatomical practice, but what gives it greater visibility in the 1604 frontispiece is the acknowledgment that fragmentation is also crucial to the formation of a new kind of anatomical knowledge. A version of the anatomy lesson appears in the frontispiece, but the focus is not on a single practitioner or an unruly audience but on an imaginary gathering of anatomists, surgeons, and students from different historical times and geographical locations.9 Vesalius is given precedence and uses one hand to point to the portrait of his Roman predecessor Galen, who is inserted into the inside wall of the arch. Two of the other ten participants can also be identified: on Vesalius’s right is the Spanish anatomist Juan de Valverde de Amusco, and on his left is the Venetian surgeon Giovanni Andrea della Croce.10 The two men join Vesalius in touching the headless corpse, although Vesalius makes the surgical opening of the stomach that usually started the public lesson. The title Anatomia, surmounting the gathering and framed by the barrel-vaulted triumphal arch, now accompanies Vesalius’s name, indicating that his treatise has become synonymous with anatomy but also that anatomy is a shared practice and does not belong to Vesalius alone.11 It so happens that this is also the title given to Valverde’s treatise in its first Italian edition of 1560. By 1604, a considerable number of publications had responded to Vesalius’s Fabrica.12 These ranged from editions of the plates (accompanied by other texts) to discussions of medical knowledge that included critiques, corrections, and additions. As early as 1545, Thomas Geminus published forty-one images, the first large set of plates to be printed in London (most of them from the Fabrica), titled A complete delineation of the entire anatomy engraved on copper.13 This compendium included the text, translated into English, from Vesalius’s other publication, Epitome (a set of fourteen largescale printed plates with a short explanatory text, also published in 1543), which was 38

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replaced by different texts in English for the 1553 and 1559 editions.14 Some plates were simplified; others were created anew by bringing together in one plate body parts scattered through Vesalius’s treatise. Geminus transformed the woodcuts of the man and woman at the center of Vesalius’s 1543 Epitome, discussed later in this chapter, into a single image of Adam and Eve.15 This altered version of the image reappeared in the 1642 edition of the Epitome published in Amsterdam and held in the Jesuit Collegio Romano in Rome, as well as in various editions of the Fabrica.16 In 1556, Valverde extensively reworked Vesalius’s text and images for his Spanish-language Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano, published by Antonio Salamanca and Antonio Lafreri in Rome.17 The Antwerp publisher Christopher Plantin in turn produced a version of Valverde’s images, which he published in 1572 with a different text under the title Vivae imagines partium corporis humani (Living Images of the Parts of the Human Body).18 In the preface to this book, Plantin declared that he had learned that an anatomical book by a certain ingenious de Valverde had been published in Italy with engraved illustrations. It was done with such skill that it easily surpassed the efforts of all those who had previously taken on the same task. As soon as I had obtained a copy of the publication, I immediately began an assiduous search to see if there was no craftsman in your city who could measure up to the Italians. Once I found such a person (and after having put his expertise and skill to the test first) I immediately immersed myself in the project, hoping that speed would also bring some esteem with it.19

Plantin’s concern with both craftsmanship and scholarly value demonstrates the diversity of motivations for deploying an increasingly large repertoire of available anatomical images. While Vesalius complained about the ubiquitous use of his images, Plantin considered published images a viable option for a motivated and informed publisher.20 Vesalius’s research findings were also discussed and critiqued in many sixteenthcentury anatomical publications, including the 1559 De re anatomica (On anatomy) by Realdo Colombo, who replaced Vesalius at the University of Padua in 1541.21 Published responses generated a wide range of debates—for example, Gabriele Falloppio’s 1561 Observationes anatomicae (Anatomical Observations), to which Vesalius responded in a letter published in Venice in 1564, after his death.22 According to H. W. Janson, the unusual woodcut of three apes enacting the suffering of the antique sculpture of Laocoön and his sons is Vesalius’s own response to the critique he received from defenders of Galen (fig. 30).23 Published exchanges became increasingly productive for anatomical knowledge, and it was precisely the detachment of texts and images from their initial context that enabled new possibilities to emerge. These exchanges of anatomical images seem all the more unexpected given the antagonistic relationship that is thought to have existed between Vesalius and Valverde. The close connection between their images has never been in question, but B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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Figure 10. Frontispiece from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Anatomia del corpo humano (Rome: Salamanca & Lafreri, 1560). Engraving. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

scholars have sided with Vesalius in his accusations of plagiarism, a claim that has undermined the status of the Spaniard’s treatise.24 Yet correspondences between the two treatises are rarely considered from other points of view, including those of early modern anatomists and publishers such as Colombo, Falloppio, and Plantin. Valverde himself responded to the allegations of plagiarism that followed the 1556 Spanish edition, and in the preface of his 1560 Italian edition Anatomia del corpo humano (Anatomy of the Human Body), he argued for a collective and accumulative approach to knowledge. In this he was not alone. In his treatise, Colombo claimed that anatomy should perfect itself “by progressive accumulation of knowledge, so that every treatise must inevitably be rewritten.”25 I take up this issue more fully in chapter 2, but I wish to consider here what the intersection of the two sets of images in the 1604 frontispiece reveals about violence that neither can reveal on its own. The different functions of public anatomy lessons and private dissections conducted in hospitals and universities are not discussed in Vesalius’s Fabrica, but they emerge in the intersection of images in the 1604 frontispiece. In this regard, the close engagement between the treatises of Vesalius and Valverde is of particular interest.26 The pairing of the monkey and pig at the pinnacle of the architectural structure in Vesalius’s 1604 frontispiece first appears in the 1560 Italian edition of Valverde’s treatise (fig. 10). This pairing, like the recurring appearance of the skull and the skeleton, 40

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is usually interpreted as an established symbol of anatomy, one that, thanks to the shift in study from nonhuman to human animals, is said to be anachronistic but persistent.27 Yet, as Carlino affirms, pigs, monkeys, and dogs were still used in public demonstrations as substitutes for the human body, a practice mocked in Vesalius’s illustrated letter Q with the usual group of zealous putti dissecting a dog.28 In fact, the question of the proper object of anatomical study was changing, not only because of increasing claims that Galen’s use of apes diminished the value of his anatomical achievements but also to rumors that techniques of vivisection were being applied to both human and nonhuman living bodies. Many anatomists considered vivisection crucial to the making of anatomical knowledge, but its visibility was not unproblematic, especially as it raised questions about what transpired in the hidden spaces of anatomical practice. The pairing of the pig and monkey is not just an anachronistic symbol of anatomy but part of what was at stake in the distinctions that defined the diverse spaces of anatomy. At the bottom of the architectural structure of Valverde’s frontispiece, three relief scenes divide the practices of dissection between the public lesson at the center and two private procedures on either side. In the public lesson, the large audience, seated in concentric circles, surround the senior teacher, whose arm gestures upward as he makes a point, while the body on the table serves as the example; in the private dissection on the right, a small group of participants intervene much more directly on the body of a woman sprawled on the table with an arm dangling over the edge. In Vesalius’s 1604 frontispiece, the hidden practices of dissection do not end with the inclusion of the nonhuman animals used in both public anatomy lessons and private experiments with vivisection. The public anatomy lesson over which Vesalius and other renowned practitioners preside is juxtaposed with the now familiar vivisection table.29 Duplicating the image of the vivisection table in Vesalius’s treatise, this table displays the many tools assertively impaled in its wooden surface, extending over the table’s edge and activated by the enthusiastic gestures of two putti. In contrast to the public lesson depicted above, conducted in an imposing space framed by a barrel vault and arch, this table is situated in a small paneled room. Even the use of playful putti links this image to the illicit spaces of the illustrated letters of the alphabet in Vesalius’s treatise. It so happens that the first visual image in the 1543 treatise, in the dedication to Charles V, is the illustrated letter Q, which shows a pig struggling against the chains that bind it to a table as putti vivisect it.30 What was previously contained within the space of the illustrated letter now gains visibility in the frontispiece. As with everything else on the 1604 title page, the two tables are not kept apart. The table may include a wide range of instruments deployed in anatomical procedures, but, as already noted, it evokes the living body with its display of shackles used to restrain struggling limbs. But now the force of the human limb is suggested by the arm of the person under dissection in the public anatomy lesson, activating B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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Figure 11. Frontispiece from Realdo Colombo, De re anatomica (Venice: Nicolai Bevilaqua, 1559). Engraving. © British Library Board, 42.h.4.

the instruments used to cut, penetrate, and scrape bodily matter. The arm dangling over the side of the dissection table is also a distinctive feature of the frontispiece of Realdo Colombo’s On Anatomy (fig. 11), in which the anatomist uses a knife to open the abdomen of the man who lies on a stone table, leaning to his right.31 In this anatomy lesson, the hands and arms of the vivisectionists are intertwined with the man’s body, the anatomist supporting the dissected man’s left arm with his own and cutting with his right hand, which parallels the man’s arm as it almost slips off the table. Arms are also crucial to the various participants, who consult books, one an anatomical printed book with images, probably Vesalius’s, another a sketchbook in which a man draws the scene.32 In Vesalius’s 1604 frontispiece, this intervention of the anatomist’s hand is retained, as hands touch, cut, and penetrate the body, which is shown headless and thus emptied not only of life but also of social identity. Yet sensation is not erased, for the dangling arm, repeated on the garland of body parts at upper left, leads the eye to the table of instruments directly below. It is important to note the implication of bringing together the two tables that in the treatise are kept apart. Together, these two tables reveal what might otherwise remain concealed—sensation in the body under dissection—and point to the process of transformation that underlies the violence of dissection. The surplus of limbs in the garland, the lack of limbs in the figures in the niches, and the active 42

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hands and arms conducting the anatomical procedure begin to resonate in unexpected ways, intertwining the force of the fragment with the reconstruction of the body as an assemblage. The 1604 frontispiece banks on the performative effects of the skeleton and the skull, a combination of devices that first appeared in Valverde’s 1560 frontispiece (fig. 10). Valverde’s skeletons are credited with establishing the most recognizable and persistent sign of anatomy, which, together with the familiar hourglass and even the mirror-like oval framed surface, might be understood as reminders of death and decay.33 But the skeleton has a much more complicated relationship with anatomy, and certainly by 1604 it held new implications.34 The third of the three practices of anatomy displayed on the architectural panels at the bottom of Valverde’s 1560 frontispiece depicts the elaborate procedure of constructing an articulated skeleton. The anatomist and his assistants form a mobile skeleton by choosing from many bones, fitting them together, and securing the joints, all while consulting an illustrated anatomical text. In Vesalius’s 1543 treatise, however, the same scene appears in one of the illustrated letters, in which putti humorously try but fail to construct an articulated skeleton from a shambolic pile of bones.35 Vesalius, who considered the articulated skeleton to be crucial to anatomical knowledge, promoted its use, writing at the start of his treatise about his new technique of boiling the body in water till it fell apart so that all soft parts could be easily removed.36 Bone as a material for construction underlies the new relation between skeleton and anatomy. In Valverde’s 1560 frontispiece, the pig and monkey playfully move human bone around the spaces of the architectural edifice, mimicking the building materials of architecture and, by implication, the building materials of the body. The parallel between the construction of the arch and that of the body includes the sacral and coccygeal bones, which are used as metopes in the entablature.37 In the 1604 Vesalius frontispiece, bone is also considered a building material, but it is the architectural edifice itself that now stands for the body, with the skull as head, the garlands of body fragments as limbs, and the entanglements of body and architecture at the center as torso. In the remainder of this chapter I consider changing concepts of bone, especially as it became associated with the structure and animation of the body, and as interest in its material properties and theories of mobility started to clash with traditional notions of death and the afterlife. In Vesalius’s treatise, rethinking death entails multiple narrative strategies. One is the turning of the skull from its controlling frontal view to its underside, with the goal of challenging the moralizing tradition of the memento mori and its insistence on the power of death over life. Another is the reorientation of the skeleton from conduit between life and death to a form of artificial life, one made entirely of human matter. To reconsider death’s relationship to life, the crucial link between death and knowledge in Genesis had to be reconsidered. While this could not be explicitly addressed in an anatomical treatise, the B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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visual image, which insists on bone as providing structure and mobility, proved very creative in finding narrative paths of transformation through which to reconsider some of these assumptions. Bone, the most persistent reminder of death for the living, is the aspect of the body that most often concerns biblical knowledge, from the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib to the redemption of humankind in the appearance of Adam’s skull at the foot of Christ’s crucifixion. But now it is bone’s transformative potential, rather than the assumption of its rigidity and permanence, that emerges, together with its promise of future resurgence.

Bone as Structure As an assemblage forged out of different parts, some of which have been pulled apart and no longer easily fit together, the anatomical image resembles Vesalius’s account of human bones. Bones, according to Vesalius, form a structure made of parts that are separate but continuous.38 The parts bring about stability through their unity and autonomy, and they maintain the upright body because the parts must negotiate with one another in order to work as an uninterrupted continuum: “All bones are continuous with one another, and no bone is held by itself but is either part of a continuum or touches another bone or is bound to another bone to such a degree that the sage parent of things, Nature, wished mankind to use the bones as a single and continuous thing.”39 Vesalius notes that the terminology applied to bones—appendage, insertion, attachment—indicates their status as distinct entities that are complete and have clear boundaries, but also as parts of a larger whole.40 The importance of the conjoining of separate bones to fit their function becomes a metaphor for the reconstitution of the dissected body into a more perfect assemblage. Vesalius’s account of bones may not offer much new medical information, but his focus on bone as structure signals an important change. The treatise starts with a lengthy account of human bones, which bypasses the order of the dissection in favor of defining a structure for the body. Vesalius is not, of course, the first to describe bone as the hardest and driest part of the body, or to suggest that it is linked to the earth and can be hard as rock, cold, and lacking in sensation.41 Yet he rarely forecloses the possibility of new knowledge, and he reports that some physicians claim that bones can feel pain.42 Moreover, he praises bone’s durable qualities, for these qualities allow him to use architecture as a metaphor in explaining the structure bones provide. “God the supreme maker of things rightly made its substance of this temperament so as to supply the entire body with a kind of foundation,” he writes. “For what walls and beams provide in houses, poles in tents, and keels and ribs in ships, the substance of bone provides in the fabric of man.”43 If the structure means that the body is conceived from the inside out, then the body, like architecture, is built with the addition of layers that cover the structure: “Just as we see the houses of rustics are made of beams before thatching, tiles and clay are applied to them. In fact 44

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if you stripped bones and cartilages of their flesh and then joined them together, you would compare them to nothing more closely than the framework of huts when they are first erected and not yet covered with branches and earth.”44 The structure of the body is central to Vesalius’s concept of the ideal body, which is fully developed in the visual images, while the text acknowledges variety in the human form.45 The term fabric suggests the body’s structure but also, as Sachiko Kusukawa explains, the body both as fabricated, with the potential to be changed and perfected, and as made by nature following certain principles in relation to function.46 The joining of bones, for instance, is described in relation to the movements bones enable: hinges join them, as does cartilage, and they are wrapped in ligaments. Some have a bulge that fits within other bones and is called the head, implying the bone’s status as microcosm within the macrocosm of the body.47 Vesalius also considers how the projections within bones bring separate bones together: “For if bones did not swell out somewhere and were not drawn upward like hills and hollowed out again like valleys, very little could begin from them or be inserted into them. As it is, processes stand out from them like a mountain, from which more things spring forth than from level ground, and other things are then (so to speak) planted into it and built over it.”48 Thus the points of conjuncture are where the potential lies for things to grow, and for the structure’s ability to generate the rest of the body and its functions. In comparison to the muscles, which Vesalius sees as prompted by self-will to produce movement, the joints of the bones can function like a mechanized tool, directed by the mind but also able to work on their own.49 Vesalius begins the discussion of bone’s contribution to stability and mobility with the bones of the skull. This may be due to the privileging of the head over other parts of the body, but, I would suggest, there is also a strategy at work to problematize established notions of the skull. Vesalius questions the assumption that the skull is a single rounded sphere that is solid enough to survive longer than most other bones in the body. He explains how dependent the overall sphere of the skull is on sutures, entailing many individual pieces of bone that work together but are inherently separate from one another. As he often does, Vesalius proposes practical reasons for the multiple parts that form the skull. In keeping with Jacopo Berengario da Carpi’s 1518 De fractura cranei (On the Fracture of the Skull or Cranium), he points to the importance of protecting the head (and the brain) by isolating a part of the cranium that may become injured. Vesalius claims that the bones of the head are also responsible for enabling the overall ventilation of the body. Turning again to examples from architecture, Vesalius conceives the head as a kind of chimney and considers the openings within the skull crucial for the movement of “sooty waste” and the dispersion of the heat that rises from the stomach.50 The skull, then, starts to become connected to different parts of the body, rather than retaining autonomy as the seat of the senses and of the human being. B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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Figure 12. Illustrated letter O (putti boiling skull), from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 1, chap. 1, p. 1. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12. Figure 13. Five skulls, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 1, first figure. Woodcut. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

The Turn of the Skull The making of the skull into an object that stands apart from the many bones of the body is suggested in Vesalius’s treatise from the start, with the first letter of the first book an O illustrated with a scene of putti throwing a skull into a cauldron of boiling water (fig. 12).51 The technique of boiling bones to divest them of any remnants of flesh, and even to bleach them to a consistent light color, was used in their preparation for visual display. But this process of transformation went much further. The first woodcut in book 1, which deals with bone, depicts five skulls displayed in two rows, three in the upper row and two in the lower (fig. 13).52 They are numbered from left to right and arranged in profile, the three in the top row facing right and the two in the bottom row turned toward each other. The skulls are shown as fully defined sculptural entities, upright as if set on a flat surface, and casting shadows rendered with hatching. They enable the careful observation of volume, cavities, indentations, and sutures, which in every instance differ from one another. The material shape of the cranium takes precedence over the familiar frontal view of the skull. Any direct encounter with the “face” of the skull is discouraged in favor of the objective observation of differences, including the visual recognition of what is classified by the text, namely, that the first skull is “natural” in shape. But as will emerge 46

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Figure 14. Skull lying on its side, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 1, chap. 6, fourth figure. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

more fully in chapter 4, visual differences between skulls are about adhering to an ideal form rather than about function. According to Vesalius, intelligence is not affected by the shape of the skull, which in any case is usually manipulated at the start of life.53 As the highest point in the structure of the body, the skull cannot be said merely to follow the internal function of the brain.54 Moreover, at this stage, with the skulls distributed for observation on the page, the claim is of a material object already transformed by anatomical procedures. In Vesalius’s treatise, there is little opportunity to reflect on the full-frontal view of the skull that traditionally served to raise the specter of death and decay of the body.55 A different and intriguing narrative about the skull can be traced in the treatise. The skull, which makes many appearances, is frequently shown laid on its side (fig. 14).56 As an inert object reclining on the surface of the paper, the skull lacks the ability to assert its presence in the world. Instead, a changeable image proliferates across many pages, from the first section of the treatise (devoted to bones) to the last section (devoted to the brain). Some views are repeated, a choice justified by the textual account but generating a restless movement as the skull is turned one way or another, always seeming to be about to turn again.57 While the text stresses the complexities of the skull, especially of its many invisible bones and sutures, the images produce a transformative image as one turns the pages of the treatise. The proliferation of images of the skull in the treatise and its movement across the pages share some effects with representations of the skull in early modern still life painting. A case in point is the multiplication of the human skull in Aelbert van der Schoor’s mid-seventeenth-century still life, which depicts six skulls unfolding across space (plate 8). This space is pictorial rather than didactic, but the painting, like the anatomical image, seeks a space that is self-aware in its construction of material objects that oscillate between the animate and the inanimate.58 Both also tend to be interpreted as images that reassure the observer about death and sustain the status quo. In Van der

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Schoor’s painting, one of the skulls stares out and captures our attention, refusing to let go. The face itself, if we think of flesh, physiognomy, or expression, no longer exists, yet the skull appears to look back and register recognition. We know that the face we see cannot see us, but we forget that anything that can stare back will do so, and it even makes us conscious of being looked at. We search for differences between our face and the face that is no longer there, expecting, perhaps, that it will convey its secrets. Yet nowhere in its hypnotizing stare do we find evidence of what death is, of where presence now resides or even of what it might mean to be absent and yet stare back. In this painting, as in most early modern Dutch still lifes, we are provided with a context, one that quickly fills up a potentially disconcerting emptiness.59 Skulls and other bones, scattered on a stone ledge, are framed by a familiar set of objects. These are the tropes of the vanitas still life, and they are comforting, for unlike the confrontation with death, at least we know what to do with them.60 The candle flickers, the flowers are starting to droop, the hourglass will soon empty. The ground of representation is not depicted as anything other than what it is: representation. The objects are laid out for our scrutiny and, as with all representation, for our reassurance. It is the ground upon which we pursue the paths of transience, mutability, and eventual demise. As Harry Berger has remarked on the appearance of skulls in still lifes, “All the items in their neighbourhood contract the vanitas and become symptoms of supposedly pre-existing bodies of belief.” The vanitas still life, along with the overall theme of memento mori, has become commonplace in scholarly literature, and no matter how accomplished the interpretation, it tends to be deployed to justify rather than to critically interrogate the issues of materiality that sustain Dutch still lifes and artworks in general.61 The timeliness of viewing, of refilling the empty holes and imagining eyes that look back, only makes the notion of the passing of time palpable, its irretrievable value visceral. We seem to have no choice but to return to the all too familiar narrative of the briefness of life and the certainty of death, a narrative that transforms the fragile experience of life and death into something with symbolic weight.62 It may seem odd to argue for a narrative about the certainty of death as somehow reassuring, but it is precisely this tendency in images of the skull that Vesalius’s treatise seeks to challenge. The interconnected movement that animates the comforting narrative of Van der Schoor’s painting stands in contrast to Vesalius’s image of the five skulls, which, instead of facilitating the transformation of the skull that stands for death and decay, removes the skull from an imagined occupant and turns it into a sculptural form that encourages close visual scrutiny and fixes meaning. But it also differs from another view of the skull in the treatise, namely, the multiple views that are dispersed across the pages as if refusing to stand still. In effect, the incessant movement of the skull in Vesalius’s treatise undermines the potential of the memento mori narrative. In the exchange with the face of the skull, it is not the skull that is altered but the beholder, whose very look becomes infected with fear, as if death were a virus one might catch. The face has the potential 48

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to trick us, for since it speaks, sees, hears, and seems to understand, it is where we tend to think the human being resides. We continue to assume that expressions are intentional, even when we have evidence to the contrary. Our overinvestment in faces has been the focus of much discussion in recent years. Perhaps best known is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of faciality, which is not about the face or about exchanges between human beings but about the mechanisms that enable all signification.63 Faciality “makes sense” not only of the rest of the body but also of the world, because it indicates first and foremost the recognition that is so crucial to the formation of meaning. If it is difficult to extricate the face from meaning, and the face within the skull from a redeeming view of death, it is precisely because the face, as a primary strategy of recognition, tends to bank on empathy and affect. The problems of faciality are further compounded when the face is projected within the skull. The long-standing link between the materiality of the skull and the allegorical tradition of the memento mori is not surprising given that bone, thanks to its enduring properties, not only remains intact for some time after death but can also convey a sense of wholeness and containment that gives it the semblance of presence.64 Yet, as the most persistent reminder of death for the living, bones are a means of communing with the invisible.65 Bones, in contrast to soft tissue, can be conceived as standing in for the whole person and have been regarded as holding the potential for identification.66 The skull’s undeniable ability to forge a connection between the dead and the living is highly ambivalent, charged as it is by its transitory status, in which presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, can never be fully extricated from each other. The skull thus becomes a key transit point between life and death, both the furthest point before complete disappearance and oblivion and the closest point from which one might imagine being looked at from the other side. Early modern practices for dealing with the dead ranged from fear to hostility, from sorrow to humor, and from reverence to revenge.67 What is less recognized is that confrontations with this transition were much more volatile than interpretations of vanitas still life tend to acknowledge. An artwork’s ability to control this volatility is a crucial component of the vanitas still life. While faciality is the mechanism that enables signification and fixes representation, the face in the skull must contend with how death itself is a constant threat to representation. As Julia Kristeva argues in relation to Holbein’s Dead Christ, death is ultimately unrepresentable, for it is precisely what representation seeks to control in order to produce and fix signification.68 Death revealed as final and without hope for continuity or redemption unsettles the symbolic system. The interpretation of the skull, then, is especially tricky when it comes to the face’s ability to infect the beholder. In Van der Schoor’s painting, the multiplicity of skulls, itself a familiar device for contemplating the transformative potential of death, affects how each skull is regarded. In some ways, the multiplicity of skulls reasserts that each instance of confrontation with the face constitutes a continuum. The skulls, apparently laid out haphazardly on the B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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stone shelf but also forming a dynamic sequence, encourage one to project a sense of movement, animation, and expression. If this kind of movement usually implies a living body, the face here has taken on the properties of the body, producing a narrative that is compatible with organic mutability and ultimate demise. This is not to say that the representation of multiple skulls must necessarily produce the narrative flow of the memento mori. I have already suggested that the representation of the skull in Vesalius’s treatise as a whole produces a disruptive narrative flow, one that is in a constant state of transformation. One could argue that Van der Schoor’s still life also has the potential, if not to challenge the narrative flow of the vanitas, then at least to reverse it. Instead of displacing the body and its materiality by the projection of the face, it can suggest the disappearance of the face itself, as the skulls start to turn away from us and begin to deny our desire for recognition. Too many gaping mouths, nasal cavities, and eye sockets tear and interpenetrate the surface. The discontinuities discourage narrative coherence, and thus all attempts to activate or even recognize the face fail. This confrontation with the abyss of meaninglessness is achieved not by suggesting the continuity of life and death but by what Henri Bergson defined as duration—that is, time as incomplete and mobile and not representable through fixed and completed instances of movement.69 One could argue that the very multiplicity of skulls and their disarray on the ledge suggest the discontinuity and haphazardness of time, or the anonymity and indecipherability of what remains of a person after death. In other words, the mode of presentation empties out the face so that recognition, or presumed recognition, increasingly fails to take place. But what about the skull at far left, which is broken, discarded, lying helplessly on its side, and yet seems more alive than the one that stares back at us? A single upper tooth protrudes from this skull without any hope of encountering its counterpart, which might or might not be in the jawbone just out of reach at the edge of the stone slab. Once noticed, the eye sockets appear to fill in with an interior glow. We might well mistake this skull for a living face, one that exhibits the flickering glow of inner animation. Yet it exhibits not life but a kind of phantom “life” that has the power to draw one in, conveying the horror of that which is neither dead nor alive and disrupting the comforting idea of an organic passage from life to death. In Vesalius’s treatise, the strategy in which recognition increasingly fails to take place is at work across the multiple views of the skull. Ultimately, the skull turns from the recognizable face to the unfamiliar view from underneath (fig. 15).70 In its reversed form, the skull appears no fewer than three times before the sequence of dissection even begins. In this repetition of the same woodcut, the skull is barely discernible as skull, and we consider and reconsider its uneven surfaces and try to assemble a unified entity out of its crevices, cracks, and chinks. While the shape and markings never fully cohere, a central black hole starts to dominate. It becomes a skull, but a skull seen from the underside, the side that was once attached to the body. This side does not allow us to forget that the skull was once part of a body, or that this body’s death was violent. 50

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Figure 15. Skull underside, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 1, chap. 9, second figure. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

The hole is the point of separation between the head and the rest of the body, in decapitation but also in the more common form of public execution, hanging. The coherence of the skull, with its insistence on being recognized as a face, is undone through this visual inversion, just as it is undone in the textual account, which, rather than conceiving of the skull as a singular entity, insists that it is a complex assemblage in which multiple parts are sutured, separated, and overlapped. This is the moment of the turn of the skull, which privileges the head as part of the physical body and begins to proliferate outside anatomical imagery.

The Encounter of Skull and Skeleton The repositioning of the skull in Vesalius’s treatise is directly related to the changing role of the skeleton. In one of the most celebrated images in the treatise, the skeleton contemplates a skull as it leans against an antique plinth (fig. 16).71 Assuming the melancholic pose of the many saints and sinners who reflect on death by regarding a skull, the skeleton’s performance is in keeping with the proclivity of Vesalius’s skeletons to display interior feelings of anguish and despair. Intersecting the humor of such a paradox with the horror of confronting the state of death, the skeleton moves in unexpected directions. The skull prompts an excess of emotion on the part of the skeleton, just as it is does for the living in their attempt to interlock with the dead. But the skeleton is presumed to be already privy to death’s secrets, so its mournful performance must raise other possibilities. This woodcut is usually presumed to function as a moral commentary on the transience of life and thus of human knowledge, the very knowledge produced by the treatise on anatomy. Scholars typically argue that early modern B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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Figure 16. Skeleton contemplating a skull, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 1, chap. 60, second figure. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

anatomical images deployed moralizing modes of representation in order to appease social and religious authorities.72 But the image’s witty relationship to the tradition of the memento mori suggests the transformative potential of the skeleton, which as a repetition of itself is able to see beyond its own death, not as confirmation of death’s triumph over life but as self-awareness that comes with the recognition of the limits of human time. The problematizing of the relationship of death and its victim is embedded within anatomical images, and the images of the skeletons in Vesalius’s treatise provide but one context in which the limits that death imposes could not be left with the Christian concept of the salvation of the soul.73 William Schupbach argues that the command “know thyself,” ubiquitous in anatomical imagery and also associated with vanity and mortality, started to change in the sixteenth century, becoming more about the ingenuity of the makeup of the body than about its decay and demise. Abel Stimmer’s 1578 portrait of Felix Platter includes the inscription “The marvellous construction of the human body is a miracle of the ingenuity of God” and features skeletons and skulls as evidence. This frontispiece bears striking parallels with that of the 1604 edition of Vesalius’s treatise, especially the garlands of hanging fish on the architectural frame divided between the body of flesh and the skeleton. It is in the context of anatomical experimentation, including new surgical instruments, that this frontispiece displays skeletons of many kinds. For Schupbach, the combining of skeletons with a new concept of self-­ knowledge represents a split between new thinking and traditional imagery.74 I argue instead that the articulated skeleton opened up a space for rethinking the possibilities of the body as well as the limits of this knowledge. 52

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The interconnection of skeleton and skull in Vesalius’s woodcut suggests a paradoxical space that relies on the appropriation of the memento mori to invert its conventional assumptions. It displaces an empathetic approach, substituting one in which humor and even mockery question the emotional investment of the memento mori. The effect is to destabilize the clarity between the space of the living and the space of the dead, creating a space that refuses to operate within such limits. Of course, the link between anatomical space and the skeleton was forged much earlier. In sixteenth-century English, a common name for a skeleton was “an anatomy,” since the skeleton was increasingly associated with anatomical practices of stripping the body.75 Philippe Ariès argues that the fleshless skeleton was an invention of the seventeenth century and has no counterpart in earlier images, which tended to favor the corruption of flesh and the decay of the interior.76 The substitution of the decomposing corpse for the desiccated but highly animated skeleton signaled a shift in the conception of death from an organic process of deterioration to a controlled undoing of the body that held the potential to produce knowledge that would in turn reanimate the body. Berger, in his critique of the interpretation of the vanitas still life, argues that this change tended to focus on the shortness of life but not on the impact of decay.77 The new skeleton sheds any history of the corpse’s decay and in the process turns our attention from death back to life. In sixteenth-century European imagery, the skeleton is frequently engaged in trying to take the living to the other side, although it never goes there itself, for it can only be meaningful in the world of the living as a remnant of what is left on earth after death. But the anatomical skeleton enters a liminal space between life and death and makes room for anatomical knowledge. This space has its own goals. When regarded side by side, the assemblage that is the skeleton turns the skull into an inanimate fragment, especially with the continuity of notions of individual bones as dry, unchanging, and inorganic.78 And it is precisely at this moment of encounter between the two that our view of the skull continues to turn. The skull on the plinth is virtually unrecognizable as a face, not only because it is turned sideways so that the skeleton can ponder its face but because the skeleton’s hand, in keeping with traditions of the memento mori, is extended over it and covers any of the recognizable features that might have tempted us to turn the skull back into a face. As with most visual strategies adopted in the treatise, this has practical considerations, in that it enables the display of the front, side, and bottom of the skull.79 But it also means that we can no longer indulge in our usual ruminations on the skull, since it is the skeleton that now takes up this viewing point. Instead, we become aware of a split in the field of vision. We begin to realize that the viewing point that produces the vanitas narrative and the viewing point that produces new knowledge are different. Sidetracked by the skeleton’s melancholic self-regard, we have no option but to reconsider the skull from a different direction. From this new vantage point, we B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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no longer see the face in the skull but begin to realize that the body of the skull is missing. The skull is no longer physically familiar and psychically strange but becomes physically strange and psychically perplexing. When turned on its side, the skull’s sense of face is diminished, not only because one cannot see all the familiar openings but also because it reveals itself to be a head. The recognition of a head, and not a face, makes it incomplete, obviously separated from the rest of the body and thus divested of any potential life and more like lifeless matter. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the face is, for the viewer, a subjectivity that is entirely antagonistic to being embodied, because the face removes the head and creates the “person” away from the body.80 Instead of simply revealing how bone is located within the body, the articulated skeleton is a newly crafted body, extended in its movement and agility, and dependent on new medical technologies and a substantial number of human corpses. Andrea Carlino explains that Vesalius always demanded the use of a skeleton when he conducted teaching dissections, and that he himself assembled and articulated at least three skeletons in different teaching venues.81 For Vesalius, the making of a skeleton was as important as the dissection of the body in the production of anatomical knowledge, and the technique of articulation, with its sustained deployment of touch, was considered the most effective way to assess the materiality and form of bones.82 Vesalius promoted new techniques for assembling and articulating the skeleton and criticized Galen for using the established practice of cutting out the bones, putting them in coffins, covering them with lime, and then putting them for an extended time in water.83 Vesalius argued instead for the boiling of stripped bones to the point that they were divested of all bodily matter and reduced to separate clean bones. The synchronized interconnection between different bones is usually what the articulated skeleton demonstrated during the annual anatomy lesson and in the anatomical museum. In Vesalius’s treatise, however, the skeletons—including the one contemplating the skull—demonstrate their modular construction through the performance of excessive sorrow and anguish (fig. 17).84 The very intensity of the emotions expressed by the skeleton enables the display of bone’s remarkable suppleness.85 Yet the intensity of emotion is enacted by an entity that lacks the physical basis for emotional experience, especially flesh, blood, and tears. And the emotional animation of the skeleton only increases in relation to its proximity to bare bone, as if it mourns not only for having been returned to its barest state but also for having to endlessly demonstrate its own sorrow and pain. It is as if the skeleton, in order to enter artificial life, must lament its separation from flesh and blood. Harcourt, referring to the skeletons in Berengario’s treatise, suggests that the anatomical skeleton, because of its unstable history between life and death, is frequently located within a “restless and eerie” life, which helps sustain the appearance of coherence and coordination.86 Be that as it may, the skeleton oscillates between occupying the 54

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Figure 17. Skeleton weeping, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 1, chap. 60, third figure. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

end and the beginning of life, but it always retains a projection of an afterlife, be it after death or at the start of artificial life. The rebuilt skeleton envisioned by Vesalius was not about facilitating the observation of the body, as in the case of the woodcuts of the muscles, but about mechanical simulation of animation itself.87 The skeleton was transformed from the envoy of death into a kind of automaton, a replica of human mobility that demonstrated the mechanisms of movement and was forged by new technologies for reshaping and assembling bone. The interest in techniques that produced artificial movement, as with the automaton, resulted in new ways of thinking about the conjoining of bones with wire and pins, a technique that became established enough to be pictured on Valverde’s title page alongside private and public dissection (fig. 10).88 Thus, while within physiological knowledge bones were associated with permanence and inorganic ­matter—in contrast to the soft, fleshy parts of the body—the reconstructed skeleton became a key entity for understanding change and potential transformation by unveiling the body at the level of the structure. The connecting joint was regarded as a ready-made mechanical tool that brought to the body the potential for further expandability and malleability.89 Increasingly B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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Figure 18. Skeletal figure hanging from rope, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 2, seventh figure, p. 90. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

accumulating contradictions, the skeleton entered a new liminal position between the limits of the human body and its artificial replicate. While the detachment of bone and flesh became associated with new technologies, the process of detachment could not escape physical violence. In Vesalius’s treatise, the skeletal structure shows itself becoming detached from the flesh when the dissection of the muscles reaches its end and the display of internal muscles can no longer sustain the body (fig. 18). While the previous figures project the force and agility produced by the muscles to counter the mounting decimation of the figure’s animation, this one has reached the threshold between flesh and bone. Vesalius explains that the figure is held up by a rope in order to enable full observation of what by now is a hollow cavity that reveals the diaphragm. Harcourt argues that this represents the key point at which the muscle figures start to reveal the limits of their representational format and the figure collapses, unable to sustain the illusion of movement.90 The claim is that the figure is about to reveal its true self as spent, and, as with Carracci’s man hanging on the scaffold, the rope is required to provide support and retain the body’s verticality. But the rope is also a means of evoking death at the scaffold. There is an unmistakable intermingling of the rope and the rectangular structure, which appears 56

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behind the figure and evokes the silhouette of the scaffold. The setting of Vesalius’s figures within a landscape of ruins is usually considered to be a substitute for the unknown terrain of the internal body.91 But in this instance the setting is about locating the body within the moment of extreme violence, the moment between life and death. Other details of the dissection evoke the man’s brutal death. The peeling of bodily matter in the dissection begins to resemble the constraining of the upper body at the time of execution, although now the figure seems to be breaking out of these constraints. The rope is not tied around the neck but is threaded through openings in the cheekbones. A sharp yank of the rope has pulled the head backward, allowing us to observe the mechanisms of the windpipe and providing an unobstructed view of the head’s underside. The rope catches the shoulder bone, indicating a state of fragility, and recalls the way the rope around Carracci’s hanging man tilts the shoulder upward and insists on verticality (plate 1). It is the rope that in both instances brings about the passage to death, in the Carracci drawing by tilting the head and registering the breaking of the neck and in the woodcut by turning the head entirely to its underside. In the drawing, all energy is spent, while in the woodcut energy seems to be increasing as the mouth opens to such an extent that it builds to the force of a scream, a scream all the more horrifying because it is both generated and eradicated by the squeezing effect of the rope. Next to the screaming head, at upper right, is the abstracted image of the diaphragm seen from below, a discordant note of objective information in the midst of violent destruction. With the rope as the tool of both death and revelation, it would be hard to imagine a closer relation between knowledge and death. But transformation does not cease with death. Every aspect of the figure’s embodiment, from the dangling remnant of flesh to the organs that enable the breath of life, appears to emerge from within, inflating the now visible skeleton and pressing it forward. In particular, the lower part of the body is expanding, and internal parts seem to split open in order to accommodate an explosive extension of the body. The muscles and tendons that keep the body upright and in motion are ripped open, allowing the figure to exert its force. With a pose that is simultaneously assertive and destructive, the figure effectively creates the illusion of generating new life from death, from the scream unleashed by the squeezing of the rope, from the sudden implosion of the ribs, and from the cutting of the windpipe that reverberates throughout the body. The encounter between the force produced by the sudden denial of air and the energy exerted by the living body are inseparable, and together they intensify the moment of transition from life to death. The image in Vesalius’s treatise conceives of this combined effort in the act of dissection as it looks back to the act of execution. It turns the dissection of the body into a reiteration of the execution, not in order to conflate the hanging and the dissection (as in Carracci’s drawing) but to unleash the force of the body just as it reaches the ultimate state of disintegration. The skeleton about to be deprived of embodied experience calls up the ultimate powers of B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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­ hysical sensation. These powers can only be produced through the imposition of p violence that enacts its destruction without consideration for the body’s logic. At this most transitional point, the skeleton reacts to the actions that have transformed it into pieces by joining in the violence that no longer needs the pretext of the pursuit of knowledge.

Adam and the Skull The biblical account of creation and the Fall, linking bone to both life and death, is a narrative thread found in both of Vesalius’s treatises. Interestingly, it is primarily in the Epitome, the set of fourteen large-scale printed tables with a short explanatory text, also published in 1543, that the confrontation with death returns to Genesis and to the narrative of Adam and Eve.92 This is the only explicit image of Adam and Eve, although Vesalius refers to the two figures—the only fully fleshed figures in either treatise—as man and woman, in keeping, perhaps, with the account in the book of Genesis (fig. 19a–b).93 The figures appear on separate but facing pages, not within a fictive setting (as do other animated figures) but against the flat page, with the text adjusted to accommodate the figures. They thus seem to be located within the anatomical narrative of the treatise rather than the historical narrative of Genesis. The figures are placed at the center of the Epitome’s innovative format, which divides the plates with large-scale full-length figures at different stages of dissection in two directions. As the text suggests, the tables are to be read from the middle outward, moving simultaneously forward and backward. The male figure starts the sequence back toward the front of the volume with the display of the bones, followed by the muscles. The female figure, meanwhile, continues the sequence toward the back of the volume with the account of the nerves. The two figures meet at the center of the Epitome under the heading “The names of the external regions or parts of the human body visible without dissection.” The text suggests that the organization of the body can best be understood by considering the external parts of the body, a body barely distinguishable between the male and the female. In effect, Vesalius divides the body into internal cavities that contain distinctive workings of the body—the head, and the two in the trunk, one for the heart and one with the gastrointestinal tract and reproductive organs. Vesalius credits Egyptian doctors with making this division and suggests that knowledge that can be imprinted on the surface of the body through the observer’s memory.94 The figures stand for our consideration, gesturing toward their perfect naked bodies but at a key moment of change. The gestures that suggest transition from perfection to imperfection obstruct anatomical knowledge, starting with the woman, who covers her genitalia. The man does not cover himself, but our assessment of his body is interrupted by his own intensely sad look downward at the skull he cradles against his thigh. If we consider the sequence of images in Vesalius’s Epitome, the 58

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Figure 19a–b. Adam / Eve, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica liborium epitome (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), fols. 9r–10v. Woodcut. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

figure contemplating the skull, presumably Adam contemplating himself, is followed by the woodcut of the skeleton contemplating the skull (fig.16) from the Fabrica. The arrangement of the images encourages the comparison of Adam and the skeleton, both immersed in self-reflection by the recognition of their own death. Kathleen Crowther has argued that vernacular anatomical texts invited extended meditation on Adam and Eve in their postlapsarian state, raising concern about the decay and dissolution of the body without explicitly representing it. The implication is that the Bible’s first man and woman could serve as substitutes for the natural body and offer readers both knowledge of the body and an image of death that stood for the ultimate experience of the self.95 Crowther argues that by alluding to the Fall, these texts denied readers’ capacity for such knowledge, yet it is important to recognize that the deployment of the biblical narrative in anatomical images had its own strategies.

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Figure 20. Adam and Eve, from Thomas Geminus, Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio (London: John Herford, 1545). Inserted folio after Biii. Engraving. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

What, then, is the status of these figures, paired yet apart, naked yet uncomfortable, intended to be observed yet difficult to see? How do their seemingly contradictory performances intersect? It is telling that Vesalius did not include them in the Fabrica, although they were added to later editions of his treatise in the revised version first used in Thomas Geminus’s Compendiosa (fig. 20). Published in London only two years after Vesalius’s own treatises, the Compendiosa includes forty-one images, almost all from the Fabrica except for the images of the man and woman from the Epitome, now transformed into a single image that erases any ambiguity about the identity of the fallen Adam and Eve.96 A great deal of trouble was taken to combine the two images into one. In a folded page that appears at the beginning of the volume, the new image retains the same combined size as the two in the Epitome but is extricated from the text. It now serves as a kind of frontispiece, followed by the rest of the images in the general order of the Fabrica. The two figures have been brought together in a continuous flat landscape. They pose for our consideration not as models of bodily perfection but as the natural human body after the Fall, under the shadow of both death and sin. Adam now holds not a skull but the apple, which, once eaten, excluded the pair from the Garden of Eden, while Eve registers discomfort at her nakedness. The skull remains, but instead of being cradled against Adam’s thigh, it lies on the ground between Adam and Eve, turning the orientation of the pair from the ver60

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tical perfection of paradise to the horizontal dispersion of mortality. The circular orb is initially indiscernible, not only because it confronts the observer with Vesalius’s image of the underside of the skull but also because it becomes the domain of the twisting snake that moves in and out of its cavities. It seems remarkable that the view of the skull that in Vesalius’s treatise defamiliarized the perception of the skull as memento mori is now reasserted as the symbol of death and disobedience. It is not only the identity of Adam and Eve that is asserted but also their place in the legacies of death and sin after the Fall. In The Golden Legend, the influential apocrypha compiled by Jacopo de Voragine in the second half of the thirteenth century, the question of the skull’s location is crucial, as the result of the Fall was said to be that Adam’s “head was bowed to the ground,” condemning all his children to be born and “let fall prone upon the ground.”97 Seen from the underside, the skull is unrecognizable as a face, and it is relocated by the snake that crawls and returns it to the ground. The legend that Adam’s skull was buried in Golgotha includes the double meaning of face and mouth, and it also suggests that the cross was erected on Adam’s face and that blood poured into his mouth.98 Voragine recounts that when Adam died, his son Seth planted on his grave a branch of the Tree of Knowledge given to him by the archangel Michael from the Garden of Eden.99 The branch grew into a tree, which, after being cut in order to be used for the erection of Solomon’s temple, was forgotten and buried, only later to be rediscovered and used for the cross on which Christ was crucified. Thus when the skull of Adam appears at the foot of the cross, it recalls Christ’s redemption of original sin and the crucial link between the bones of Adam and knowledge. The revised image of Adam and Eve from Geminus’s Compendiosa not only found its way into later editions of Vesalius’s Fabrica but frequently replaced the double image in the 1543 Epitome. In some seventeenth-century northern European anatomical prints, the reversed skull with intertwined snake, which even holds the apple from the Garden of Eden, defines the female body as Eve, inflecting the project of anatomy with a clear moralizing purpose.100 In these prints, mortality and sin are within Eve as much as the internal organs displayed all around her, but all of the internal parts, like the skull with snake, achieve considerable material specificity through the sharp clarity of the printed line. When the covering flap is removed from the skull, the brain tissue and nerves can be observed, as if the skull could hold in place both the body’s physical matter and its moral condition, as long as the symbolic import and the physical matter overlapped. Yet not all of Adam and Eve’s appearances in anatomical treatises take distinct sides on the legacies of biblical Genesis. As an image of the postlapsarian body, the two could maintain a considerable level of ambiguity even as the contradictions between biblical and anatomical knowledge mounted. In the frontispiece of Plantin’s 1572 Vivae imagines partium corporis humani (Living Images of the Parts of the Human Body), which uses Valverde’s images, Adam and Eve replace the skeletons B o d i ly A n i m at i o n

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that frame Valverde’s title page and prove no less uncertain about their place in the moral implications of death (fig. 21). In this frontispiece, the two animated figures stand at the very edges of the architectural frame, without enough space upon which to stand properly and display their bodily state. On the one hand, they are aligned with the ideal proportions of the antique columns; on the other, they confront each other with eagerness and curiosity and disclose no concern for their nakedness. For figures expected to comply with an established narrative, they are more attuned to the internal workings of the body than to the transformation from one state to another. Adam balances an apple on his hand in an unusual gesture of play, neither offering it nor taking it back but suspending it in the moment of change. The twirling of the apple, a motif that emerges in other representations of Adam and Eve, suggests that he is offering knowledge and its seductive pleasures. In the cartouche of the Plantin press, a drawing compass crisscrosses the possibilities and limits defined by death, which is to say, by the skull. Are Adam and Eve forgetting their own legacy as they gain awareness of the consequences of choosing knowledge, in particular the achievement of new anatomical knowledge? Death remains part of the project of anatomy, and it is frequently associated with the lingering memory of Adam’s skull. If we turn to the sequence of images in Vesalius’s Epitome, Adam’s contemplation of the skull seems closer to the skeleton’s contemplation of the skull in its attitude toward death than to Geminus’s version, in which the apple takes the place of the skull. Instead of sin and the punishment of death, the skull becomes about self-awareness through the knowledge of the limits of death. Yet the woodcut of the skeleton’s contemplation of the skull returns to the book of Genesis by showing the skull as an inert cluster of bones that does not retain the jawbone, which in representations of the crucifixion is usually detached from the skull but found nearby.101 In both images of self-contemplation, the strangeness of the skull as object is partly produced through this omission. Van der Schoor’s still life also keeps the jawbone apart from but next to the skull. This is not incidental, since the separation of skull and jawbone implies the loss of voice, a loss attributed to Adam, who was credited with the origins of a common language. After the Fall, he is said to have lost the ability to give things their true name, his language no longer in sync with nature and instead formed piecemeal and by necessity.102 Vesalius’s image of the skeleton contemplating the skull evokes this ongoing debate but switches the jawbone with the hyoid bone, which is situated at the base of the tongue and supports the tongue and muscles, and which the anatomist claims is the only other autonomous bone within the head.103 The hyoid bone now appears near the skull at the edge of the plinth, offering an unexpected parallel to the jawbone. Vesalius adds that this bone is ambiguous in identification as it is rarely seen, even within anatomy, and that because it is connected to the tongue, it is sometimes known as Adam’s bite. The switch from a bone (and an image) associated with Adam to one that brings visibility to new knowledge about a less familiar bone with related prop62

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Figure 21. Adam and Eve, frontispiece from Vivae imagines partium corporis humani (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1572). Engraving. © British Library Board, c112.f.6.

erties is both witty and purposeful. There is a conflation of the bite (perhaps the bite of the apple) and the tongue (perhaps the acquisition of language). Of course, Vesalius is arguing for the mobility of bone, even attributing to it voice and language, but there is even the insinuation of the emergence of language from Adam’s move away from God’s authority. By mimicking the display of the jawbone, Adam is not only evoked but also distanced from the idea that knowledge is always at one with nature and outside human intervention. Adam and Eve enter Vesalius’s treatise only to depart. In Vesalius’s Epitome, there are already traces of this departure, but also of transitions to other anatomical publications in which Adam and Eve reconfirm the legacy of Genesis. The link between knowledge and death is by no means eradicated. On the contrary, the force of the violence revealed through the anatomical image lurks behind new knowledge, but in a different way than the snake lurks within the skull.

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Chapter 2

Bodily Mutation From Muscles to Flesh and Blood

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uan de Valverde de Amusco’s 1556 Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (History of the Composition of the Human Body) is an innovative translation of Vesalius’s 1543 De humani corporis fabrica, not only from one language to another—Latin to Spanish—but also from one cultural outlook to another. In his dedication of the treatise to Cardinal Juan Álvarez of Toledo, whom he served as personal physician, Valverde makes a spirited denunciation of the state of Spanish medicine, which he claims was increasingly hampered by strong social taboos against the dissection of corpses. Explaining that this was due to its “being an ugly thing among the Spanish to tear to pieces dead bodies” and implying that attitudes toward the body were culturally specific, and that they were not necessarily altered by a change of location, he continues: “There are few [Spaniards] who, coming to Italy, where they could learn, do not hesitate to occupy themselves in other exercises, because they are not accustomed to such things; and seeing the damage that follows for the entire Spanish nation, in part because surgeons know little Latin, in part because Vesalius did not write clearly and can only be understood with difficulties, and only by those that first have had a body before their eyes a few times, and a good teacher to show them.”1 Identifying himself as both a Spaniard and an anatomist, Valverde takes a critical stance against poor Spanish-language skills and unyielding attitudes, but he also rebukes Vesalius for not being more attentive to his readers, especially those who have not had access to the dissected body. He insists on the importance of engaging closely with the human body for the sake of medical knowledge, referring repeatedly to the limitations of Galen’s anatomical work conducted on nonhuman animals. Valverde encourages other Spanish surgeons to follow his example and go to Italy, “where you can easily see those who have carried out this practice their entire life with more abundance of men than Galen was able to have of apes.”2 Valverde was in fact very well placed to produce a translation that addresses more than language. During his long sojourn in Italy, he engaged closely with the work of anatomists, especially Vesalius and Colombo, and strongly endorsed their commitment to the dissection and observation of the human body. But he continued to subscribe to theories of the bodily humors favored in Spain and argued for difference between human bodies and for the body’s indivisibility.3 Valverde changed Vesalius’s text, both by altering the order of its parts and by inserting many passages that make a case for an integrated concept of the internal workings of the body. For example, he starts the first book, on the bones, with a description of the body as a system of circuits and flows that circulate nutrients, spirits, and blood. He distinguishes between elements (flesh, fat, bones, blood) that are found throughout the body and those that remain in a particular location (nerves, veins, muscles, fingers, hands, head, arms, chest).4 Before he starts to follow Vesalius and discuss the bones, Valverde outlines a complex humoral system of continued interaction between moving components and sees no problem with intermixing this with the new role that Vesalius ascribed to the bones: 65

Some parts serve as coverings, or dressings, as do the skin, the fat, the fleshy fabric, and the flesh, others maintain the bones together, like the bindings; others serve to cook delicacies, like the stomach, the thin guts, and some veins of the membranes, others make the blood, like the liver, others take it to all the members, like the veins, others make the life spirits, like the heart, others carry these spirits throughout the body, like the arteries; others, like the brains, make spirit of the senses, others, like the nerves, distribute them throughout the body, others, like the muscles, serve movement, which depends on our will. . . . Others serve as foundation or armature, upon which all other parts are assembled and secured, such as the bones and cartilages.5

The body becomes a coordinated set of channels through which food is digested and expelled, blood and spirits are made and distributed, and circulation is facilitated but also thwarted. What emerges is a more complicated idea of bodily animation, which includes Vesalius’s focus on self-will, with its drive to move and thrive, and the unconscious processes through which the body mutates and struggles in the continuity of its internal circuits. Valverde’s treatise transforms Vesalius’s language of the body as structure and assemblage into a language of circulation, no less concerned with the materiality of the body but more concerned with its state of change. If Vesalius’s treatise puts the conscious self and the transformative force of the body at the center of anatomy, Valverde’s replaces it with a multifaceted process of embodiment. The very concept of flesh, so crucial to received notions of the humoral body, was undermined by Vesalius’s conception of the body as an assemblage of parts activated by the force of muscles and the dexterity of bones. Valverde returns the body to its lingering associations with flesh, which retain much of what is indecipherable about the living body and its transient physicality. In effect, according to Valverde, bodily sensation, and especially pain, is part of a body that bleeds, digests, expels, feels, and perceives. In Valverde’s translation, the visual image is particularly effective in conveying what the text cannot. Indeed, according to Valverde, the work of responding to Vesalius’s treatise was best done through the images. As is well known, Vesalius accused Valverde of stealing his images and of caring more about profit than about scientific research.6 Valverde did not ignore Vesalius’s accusations, and he took the opportunity in the preface of the 1560 Italian edition of his treatise to address what evidently had become a public controversy. In the dedication of that edition to King Philip II of Spain, Valverde claims that because he had first published his treatise in Spanish four years earlier, people who could not read Spanish had presumed that his book was a literal translation of Vesalius’s treatise.7 Others, however, recognized that there were crucial differences between the two, including that his images were better organized than Vesalius’s, and thus wanted an Italian edition of Valverde’s treatise. Valverde admitted that an incentive to translate the treatise into Italian was that he still held the copper plates, implying that although the text was necessary to discern the 66

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relation of his images to those of Vesalius, it was the copper plates that carried the crucial relation between the two. Valverde makes a strong case for the importance of using Vesalius’s images—not simply for reproducing them but for using them as a baseline from which to develop knowledge about the body. He encouraged readers to compare the two treatises, much as Vesalius assumed that his treatise would be read alongside Galen’s.8 This proposition appears first in Valverde’s dedication of the original 1556 Spanish edition to his patron and patient the cardinal: “And if someone be so diligent that not content with only the Historia would also like to understand the differences that are between them, read it together with Vesalius . . . who without doubt has surpassed all his predecessors in these matters.”9 In the short preface to the reader that follows, Valverde once again raises the question of Vesalius’s images and how important it was to deploy them in order to engage with, and develop further, his ideas and arguments: Even though some friends of mine thought that I should devise new images, without taking up those of Vesalius, I did not want to do it in order to avoid the confusion that could follow, being less easy to know with what I agree or disagree with him, and because his figures are so well done that it seems to me envy or antipathy not to profit from them. Mostly it has been for me as easy to improve them, as it would have been difficult for anyone to separate themselves from these and make others that are as good.10

The bold claim that it is easier to improve on Vesalius’s images than to produce others is backed up by Valverde’s meticulous explanation of how he arranged the images. The anatomist informs the reader that he reproduced each of Vesalius’s images in strict synchronic sequence, and “because mine are engraved in copper, and cannot be mixed in with the Historia without great confusion, I have put all that belong to a book at the end of that book.”11 Valverde insists that the order of the images within each chapter remains unchanged and that the information included in the captions will facilitate the relation between his images and those of Vesalius. The images now form a more coherent narrative, owing both to their proximity to one another and to their intersection with Vesalius’s images. Each image is like its counterpart in Vesalius’s work but also different, some to the extent that they have become unrecognizable when considered out of sequence. The first image in book 2 of Valverde’s treatise, dedicated to the muscles, is often viewed as a new invention rather than a copy, and it is sometimes attributed to Vesalius.12 Yet this is also to misunderstand the relationship between the two treatises and the importance of what is forged not just in one set of images but also between the two. As the key image that starts the section on dissection, the first engraving in book 2, like its woodcut counterpart in Vesalius’s treatise, initiates a consideration of the project of anatomy, questioning both the materiality of the body and how its study is affected by the practices of anatomical dissection (fig. 22). A full-length male figure stands frontally and with his raised right arm holds up an amorphous B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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Figure 22. Figure holding sack of skin, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (Rome: Salamanca & Lafreri, 1556), bk. 2, plate 1. Engraving. © British Library Board, c112.f.10.

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Figure 23. Figure displaying muscles, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 2, plate 1. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

mass of skin.13 The figure turns its head toward the suspended skin, producing an unexpected encounter with its own face, one that emerges from holes on the skin that once accommodated eyes, nose, and mouth. The doubling of the face continues with the body divided between surface without form and interior with muscles that retain bodily contours. The counterpart in Vesalius’s treatise (fig. 23) offers a view of the same system of muscles but unimpeded by other bodily matter and open for observation as a body that is all the more readable as coherent and whole by keeping to the ideal form of the antique statue of the Apollo Belvedere. While the male figure appears pared down to the indispensable muscles and operates autonomously from the rest of the body, it is supported in the task of demonstrating strength and mobility by being set within an extended landscape of Roman ruins.14 It has been argued that the setting of the anatomical figures of the muscles within a ruinous landscape locates the human body between nature and human intervention.15 In this woodcut, the interior of both body and architecture is exposed through the same process of destruction, revealing the foundations of ancient architecture and the structure of the human body. The landscape of each woodcut forms a continuous sequence, and when the pages of the treatise are B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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c­ ontinuously turned, they generate the illusion of bodies in movement.16 The format of the treatise activates the mechanisms of the body, and together they produce bodily animation as an uninterrupted flow of energy. Valverde’s image discards the landscape of ruins and thus disregards the animation achieved through the technology of the book. The figure stands against the ground of the paper, located in a void that, like the ancient ruins in Vesalius’s image, is a reflection of the body itself. According to Valverde’s caption, his image narrates dissection’s process of emptying out the body: “The first image shows a man taking off the skin and the fat, and the veins that are between the hide and the flesh, and all the fleshy fabric, except the part that is converted into muscles, and it should be known that this figure is different from that of Vesalius, in that in this one the shading shows the paths of the threads of the flesh within which each particular muscle operates.”17 When the two images are considered in relation to each other, the reversal of the figure recalls the transition from woodcut to engraving and the change of technique in the cutting of the plate. In the engraving, shading is introduced at the edges of the muscles, illustrating how flesh, when threaded through the muscles, enables them to operate. Valverde points out that the cut, which in Vesalius’s image separates each of the muscles, is in fact the point at which the flesh and other matter is “converted” into muscle, suggesting that the muscles are a point of change but also of continuity within the body. In effect, the engraving uses various strategies to bring presence to what has been removed between the surface—the sack of skin—and the muscles. The effect of one image on the other also works in reverse, as the smooth lines of the muscles in the woodcut render the raggedy edges of the flesh left by the knife in the engraving that much more disturbing. Valverde’s engravings retain Vesalius’s clear presentation of body parts and their function, but they do not erase the experience of dissection itself. Like most anatomists, Valverde mentions the unpleasantness of dealing with a decaying cadaver, but he is more interested in what the practices of dissection themselves reveal about the body. He discusses, among other things, the tendency of bodily matter to remain indecipherable, the transformation from one type of bodily matter into another, and the differences in the process of decomposition between bodies: Galen “could not in the two or three times that he saw a body by chance, and almost entirely putrefied, note all the particularities that are found in man. Because even today in Italy where it is done lawfully, and many, with great diligence, . . . do nothing else, there still remain differences in some things between the most knowledgeable anatomists due to the great variety of bodies and partly due to the difficulty of the material itself.”18 While Valverde seeks to redress the state of Spanish medical practice, his larger concern is that even in Italy, where many surgeons carry out dissections, knowledge about embodiment itself remains partial and elusive. The image reprises the act of dissection itself, with a gesture that conjoins body and weapon into the ultimate tool of violence.19 This is yet another doubling, one 70

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that amplifies the effects of dissection by turning the figure into both subject and object of the flaying and defleshing of the body. While the dagger in the left hand is in plain view, it can also disappear, as it dovetails neatly into the hand and the handle becomes the index finger. Hand and blade are one, extending the diagonal of the arm and linking the weapon’s force with that of the muscles. Unlike the skin that is held apart from the body, the dagger that has detached the skin and flesh has become part of the body, conjoined in a forceful gesture that is implied in Vesalius’s version of the image. It is not unusual to present the hand as the primary instrument of surgery and thus as an instrument for using other instruments.20 The hand’s control of other instruments was regarded as the faculty of prehension, the act of grasping made possible by the muscles and tendons of the fingers.21 But here the dagger is equated with the will’s control of the muscles and with the extreme force needed to expose them, especially when one notices that the edges of the figure’s skin is frayed and flesh still clings to the edges of the muscles. The remains of bodily matter excised by the dagger convey not only the difficulty of detaching components of the body from one another but also the impossibility of fully achieving this separation. Valverde’s treatise, first published in Rome by the printing house of Antonio Lafreri and Antonio Salamanca, in Spanish in 1556 and in Italian in 1560, and then republished in Venice five times by Giunti, attracted a great deal of attention and proved a commercial success.22 It may well be that the strategies deployed by Lafreri and Salamanca to market prints widely raised problems for the acceptance of the treatise within certain sectors of the medical community.23 The publishers, partners in innovative publishing ventures such as the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, specialized in prints of the city’s antiquities, and they assembled these prints in diverse groupings that could be bought with different title pages. Lafreri and Salamanca agreed to have Vesalius’s woodcuts transposed to copper engraving by their in-house engraver, Nicolas Beatrizet, and many of the revisions to the images were executed by Gaspar Becerra.24 This was a complicated process, as images and text had to be printed separately; and because both text and image frequently appeared on the same page, these pages had to be put through the press twice, in Venice for the text and in Rome for the images.25 For Valverde’s treatise, the publishers used their established method of forming an assemblage of images, though now linked to a text, and they responded to the successful reception of the first edition by producing a new frontispiece for the 1560 Italian edition that brought the treatise into more overt relation with Vesalius’s treatise. Valverde’s treatise remains misunderstood, both in its relation to Vesalius’s and in its contribution to sixteenth-century debates about the human body. Scholars have dismissed it as derivative, yet its critique of Vesalius’s attempts to universalize and instrumentalize the body now seems very relevant. The assumption that Valverde simply copied Vesalius’s images, added superfluous details, and failed to contribute anything new to the study of the body also needs to be reconsidered.26 It is B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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common to regard the Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano as a copy of the Fabrica and Valverde as a plagiarist, primarily because art historians and historians of science have tended to take Vesalius’s comments on Valverde at face value and have not considered them in relation to changing practices in the exchange and production of anatomical knowledge (or in relation to Valverde’s response and the response of other contemporaries). This has served to undermine Valverde’s reputation, even though he followed Colombo as anatomist at the University of Padua from 1556 to 1572 and was praised for his work by contemporaries, including Gabriele Falloppio.27 Only recently has Valverde’s contribution gained some attention, and only thanks to new scholarly work on early modern Spanish medicine.28 One of my purposes in this chapter is to reconsider Valverde’s treatise by situating it within the changing practices of publishing in relation to medical knowledge. Vesalius’s treatise certainly made its author a celebrity, but it also altered the authority of the individual anatomist by provoking debate within an expanding field of publication that brought images of the anatomical body to a broader audience and new kinds of readers. Exchanges started to depend as much on the production of treatises and prints as on institutional sites of medical research, and the visual image shaped knowledge in ways that could not be limited to the arguments of individual anatomists. In an important exception to the usual interpretation of Valverde’s treatise, Cynthia Klestinec has argued that Valverde acted as a kind of editor of Vesalius’s Fabrica and reconceptualized the anatomist’s celebrated treatise. Klestinec points out that the transposition of one treatise to the other is not simply a matter of original and copy but a shift between the oral tradition of dissection to a text-based, cumulative production of knowledge. Vesalius, who was primarily concerned with the skill of the hand, in terms of both dissection and the quality of the printed image, adhered to a notion of plagiarism in which knowledge and its materials were conceived as individual property. Valverde, following the model of the humanist editor, took up the role of a scientific editor who amasses, corrects, and transmits knowledge. According to Klestinec, he was more concerned with how the text worked in relation to the images and the process through which knowledge is transmitted. By editing and abridging the text, Valverde was attempting to increase the utility of Vesalius’s own work, especially the images.29 In addition to using captions to bring coherence to the images, now collected at the end of each chapter, Valverde’s treatise starts with a detailed index of topics discussed. With all the changes introduced to book production by printing, the new role of the editor changed the conception of texts as a collective endeavor. Klestinec ultimately argues that this is an instance of the shift between literature and science charted by Michel Foucault in relation to notions of authorship, and that while in literature authorship continued to be attributed to an individual, in science it became about a shared discourse and the intellectual property of the text.30 Klestinec nonetheless proposes that Valverde’s treatise detached the production of anatomical prints from the serious study of the human body and the practices of 72

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anatomy. She suggests that Valverde, owing in part to his attentiveness to the corpse and its instability, did not consider the image a product of the process of dissection itself, and that he departed from Vesalius’s conception of a close relation between image and body.31 I argue instead that, for Valverde, the anatomical image was particularly important in relation to the practices of dissection, starting with his worries about the lack of corpses available for dissection, and that for some people (i.e., Spaniards), seeing the dissection of the body proved too distressing. In fact, Vesalius, in his preface, responds similarly to accusations that his unusually large number of woodcuts would displace the observation of the body itself.32 It is important to acknowledge that the use of images was still highly experimental and controversial, and that the strategies deployed cannot be reduced to a single purpose. Even so, both Vesalius and Valverde were particularly concerned with the issue of access and were less prepared to explain the strategies of the images. Valverde’s treatise offers a continuous commentary on Vesalius’s treatise through both images and text, with unexpected responses in the image captions that raise questions in need of further exploration. Valverde deploys the relationship between images to contribute to anatomical thinking and to the process of dissection itself, by confronting the issues of sensation and pain in relation to the embodied condition. If classification increasingly produced a body detached from indecipherable bodily matter, Valverde addresses the unknowable in the body as part of its condition of constant change. One strategy was the restoration of Vesalius’s fragmented body, not simply by filling in what had been removed but by proposing a number of doubles for the increasingly diminishing body of dissection. While violence emerges as experimental in both treatises, the differences between them only increase. The relationship between Vesalius’s celebrated set of woodcuts and Valverde’s set of copper engravings is not served well when reduced to the dichotomy of original and copy. Something new emerges when they are brought together and the focus becomes the intermediate image formed between the two.

Restoring the Body Valverde’s primary strategy to open up a dialogue with Vesalius’s images was to restore figures that had been destabilized. The restoration of antiquities in the sixteenth century has been understood as the attempt to reinstate something lost in time.33 According to Leonard Barkan, the unearthing and restoration of antiquities entailed a double procedure, since the assessment of a newly unearthed fragment prompted the beholder’s increasing awareness of the imperfect process of interpretation.34 The restoration of antiquities was speculative, and it depended on a complicated mixture of textual sources and visual observation. In the sixteenth-century Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, the album of engravings of antiquities devised by Valverde’s publishers, Lafreri and Salamanca, the prints frequently include people B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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in the process of observing, copying, and assessing the remnants of ancient Rome but also antiquities that maintained the possibility of being reconceived anew.35 Selfawareness was invariably part of a process that raised multiple possibilities, and, as Barkan argues, although the desire to make the fragment speak was strong, most antiquities retained a high level of indecipherability.36 Vesalius’s own images deal with the fragmentation of the body under dissection by deploying antique sculpture and its increasing status as both a model of bodily perfection and a site for the reconception of the human body in relation to nature and technology.37 Horst Bredekamp argues that, unlike ruins, which in natural philosophy were associated with the prehistoric powers of nature that oppose the mechanical, statues were conceived as negotiating between natural and man-made forms. Ancient sculpture was categorized as both fossil and art because it came from the ground and was believed to be undergoing further transformation. The Belvedere Torso is central to this argument and was frequently represented—for example, in Michele Mercati’s Metallotheca (ca. 1580), with its raw living stone exposed in its broken parts.38 Barkan explains that the Belvedere Torso was the focus of many sixteenth-century attempts at imaginative reconstruction but that its fame rested on its status as a fragment.39 It is not often noted that Vesalius’s use of the Belvedere Torso to frame the internal organs of the body is in itself a sequence of possible restorations. These restorations are not arbitrary, as the torso is shown with different breakage points and a variety of poses, depending on what part of the viscera is on display. The antique fragment is emptied out in the area of the stomach cavity and the relevant body parts are reassembled, but without concealing the distinction between the two, producing physical energy from sculpture to body part, and from marble to living matter.40 The restorations emphasize areas of rupture, which is where the raw stone is revealed. For Harcourt, the fractured stone displaces the violence that underlies the practice of dissection, and the deployment of the torso becomes “a brilliant pictorial evasion.”41 But the cut of the limbs, with their own display of interior “living” matter, suggests a close relation to the human body, especially to a body that has been surgically cut. Valverde certainly seems to have considered the surface of the “fractured” stone an unpersuasive substitute for flesh and bone. In Valverde’s restoration of one of Vesalius’s few female figures, which nonetheless is framed within a version of the Belvedere Torso, the damaged internal surface of the marble is turned back into flesh and bone (fig. 24). Keeping to the torso’s cut of the upper part of the limbs, the cut of dissection intensifies its effects by exposing the severed central bone as well as the surrounding tender flesh. It is a strategy that would be used in images of cannibalism in order to indicate the ultimate obliteration of the body by severing the unity of a given bone. The wound is doubled, appearing as both shattered marble and hacked flesh and bone. For both Valverde and Vesalius, the restoration of the body, like the restoration of antique sculpture, was about the future rather than the past. For both men, 74

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Figure 24. Female figure with reproductive organs, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (Rome: Salamanca & Lafreri, 1556), bk. 3, plate 5. Engraving. © British Library Board, c112.f.10.

r­ estoration was not used to complete or disguise that which has been lost. In the case of Vesalius, antique sculpture, and the Belvedere Torso in particular, suggests a way to integrate the close observation of the body with the intervention of anatomical technology on the body. In the case of Valverde, whose approach was closer to sixteenth-century practices of restoration, it becomes a confrontation with the uncertainties of the dissected body, its illegibility, transience, and inconsistencies. The indecipherability of the antique fragment offered a striking parallel to the body and resistance to the idea of the body’s unproblematic transformation into knowledge. But how does the restoration of the first figure in Valverde’s book 2 bring about this reconsideration? Valverde’s image has been compared to representations of Saint Bartholomew, especially to the European tradition of showing the saint holding his skin, the knife used to flay him, and sometimes both. Harcourt argues that familiar religious prototypes were often adapted in order to shore up the display of the structure of the body as a unified whole, especially when the display of function could not be maintained.42 The link to Saint Bartholomew might provide a succinct narrative through which to indicate the process that has taken place to expose the internal musculature. But Valverde’s image has as its primary reference point Vesalius’s B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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image, which, unlike those of the saint, does not engage with victory over pain and suffering. Instead, it seeks to make visible the form of the body—the muscles—by removing all extraneous matter. Valverde’s restoration, by contrast, is concerned with the value of that which has been taken away, and thus could be said to resemble images of Bartholomew that display the skin and knife as relics produced in the course of martyrdom. But the skin held up by Valverde’s figure is not the skin that the saint frequently wraps around his body for protection, or that Apollo takes as a protective second skin after the flaying of Marsyas.43 In Valverde’s engraving, the sack of skin is held apart from the body, a discarded container that impedes the display of the force of the muscles. The sack of skin is shown as empty, almost translucent and despondently shapeless. This is what Valverde calls the pellejuelo, a layer of skin that he claims is so fine that it resembles the skin of an onion: very thin (except on the hands and feet), without blood, and called the epidermida by the Greeks. It covers a second layer of skin, the pellejo, which provides support to so many arteries, veins, and nerves that “some have thought that the Pellejo is no more than the mixture of all of these things.” The outer skin, however, “if it sometimes breaks . . . or becomes detached, it regenerates easily without leaving any sign.”44 Valverde’s image combines Vesalius’s idealized body surface of the muscles with the memory of its former flesh embodiment. The skin, as sheer covering of the body, is now shapeless, retaining nothing of the external appearance of the person. Of course, for Vesalius, ideal form is not the surface of the skin but the surface of the muscles, which his image unveils by taking away all extraneous matter, including the skin. For Valverde, there is a great gap between the pellejuelo and the muscles that must be restored in order for the humoral body of circuits and flows to operate: “Because to speak of the muscles could cause a lack of clarity without having dealt with the skin, the under skin, the fat, and the flesh fabric, which are part of an overall covering of the entire body, it will be good to declare first what these are, starting with the under skin.”45 The double face in the image suggests this gap. Valverde explains that the parts of the face that move, such as the forehead, neck, cheeks, eyes, and lips, do so through the combined efforts of flesh and muscles, and though they are usually activated by the person, they can also move on their own.46 The expressiveness of the face is shown to belong to internal muscles as well as to the supporting bodily matter that combines with the muscles to perform mechanical tasks in order to perceive and communicate with the external world. While this deeper layer of muscles and flesh already indicates the appearance of the face, it is lacking in some adjustments that would be made by the missing surmounting layers, even if these would be minimal in the area of the face. Valverde pointedly adds that because the face has few layers between the muscles and the thin skin, this part of the body is particularly sensitive to pain. Both expression and intense sensation are located not deep within the interior of the body but in the coverings just below the pellejuelo. 76

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Figure 25. Frontispiece from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, La anatomia del corpo humano (Venice: Stamperia de Giunti, 1586). Engraving. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

This skin is very different from the much more substantial pelt of Marsyas in the frontispiece of the 1586 Venetian edition of Valverde’s treatise, which still includes the head and limbs and is twisted within itself so that the body seems empty and even more animalistic than the usual Marsyas (fig. 25).47 Suspended from the pediment of the architectural structure and held by the monkey and pig, the skin becomes a device for twisting and torturing the body, even turning its own limbs into hanging fragments. The satyr’s tormented face becomes a substitute for death itself and takes the usual place of the skull. Marsyas’s punishment for presumptuously challenging Apollo to a musical duel was the excruciating pain of being flayed alive.48 In the 1586 frontispiece, this is compounded by Marsyas’s being mocked and abused at the hands of the usual victims of vivisection—the monkey and the pig— suggesting no doubt the porous boundaries between dissection and vivisection. As a focus of punishment, the skin that still contains the face might well belong to images of Saint Bartholomew, which demonstrate the soul’s triumph over flesh at the moment of death by discarding the container that has concealed the true interior.49 Valverde’s strategies of restoration resemble those practiced in Rome for antiquities, but enacted on the printed page. First, in keeping with the treatment of B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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antique fragments too small to restore, the fragments of the body scattered throughout Vesalius’s text are gathered together and arranged as a kind of collage on a single framed page. The grouping is not haphazard in that it follows the order in Vesalius’s treatise, and each item is carefully identified with a number and a short caption.50 Valverde’s “tables” (i.e., plates) usually combine single figures with surrounding small fragments, or even a sequence of comparative figures with a key fragment, depending on the order in which they appear in Vesalius’s treatise. With the sculptural figures, such as the man holding the sack of skin, Valverde restores to the body what the dissection has taken away. This restoration ranges from replacing missing parts to revealing (without actually replacing) what Vesalius’s images omit about the effects of dissection on the body. Wrapping a body no longer protected by its usual layers of skin, fat, and flesh offers a counterstrategy to Vesalius’s use of antique sculpture to retain structure and function, even while body parts increasingly reveal gaps. As the dissected body approaches the very edge of extinction, the restoration tests a variety of doubles for a body that through the imposition of violence will continue beyond physical death. The ultimate unleashing of violence occurs in an image that takes self-dissection into the territory of cannibalism. The transformational power of violence asserts not only the body’s fragility but also its continual process of remaking itself, even in and beyond death.

Covering the Body In the attempt to define the body as an assemblage of distinctive bones and muscles with increasingly mechanistic functions, Vesalius constantly confronts the presence of bodily matter that is difficult to categorize yet is found everywhere: between bones, inside organs, intertwined with veins, and hidden in muscles. The effort to be precise about the materials encountered during the process of dissection reveals the problem of excluding the established conception of the body as flesh: Some bones are joined also by the aid of flesh, as in the femur where all joints are overlaid by muscles. For when muscles originating from one bone are inserted in another, they are rightly considered to act as bindings, and they bind the bones together. Moreover, because most ancients call muscles flesh, especially Aristotle, a connection made by muscles is deservedly called by flesh, such as in teeth . . . so the construction of bones is found in which flesh not only surrounds a joint on the outside in the manner of muscles, but intervenes in the joint as well.51

Vesalius frets over the fact that Galen, like Aristotle and other ancient writers, thought of muscles as flesh, while he distinguishes between the two. Valverde regards the two as the same matter, but matter changed from one consistency to the other by the repetition of bodily movements. 78

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For Vesalius, the body is natural but also striving toward the ideal, and thus open to change, which is conceived in terms of controlled human intervention. By contrast, Valverde keeps to the notion of the humeral body, itself part of recent debates in natural philosophy that engaged with the changing relation between the body as God’s creation that fell from grace and the body as part of nature.52 Giorgio Agamben, in his reading of Genesis, points out that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they experienced not a moral change as much as a metaphysical transformation that became visible as “the nakedness of pure corporeality.” The pair lost the grace granted by God as clothing, and as a consequence found themselves naked, exposed, and defenseless in the world. This is the state of human nature that, according to Agamben, is denigrated in scripture as being mere flesh, vulnerable and unprotected by God, destined for corruption and death. The human being had a nature of its own that was distinct from divine nature, and human nature, because it was to be dressed in the clothing of grace, was always constituted as naked and only known through the process of removal of its coverings. For Agamben, the new bodily state of Adam and Eve must be understood in relation to the switch between the leaf skirts with which they covered themselves and the tunics of animal skins that God made for them at their departure from Eden.53 That the postlapsarian body would require a stronger covering than that of its own skin implies the condition of fragility, rather than of shame, and the need of a nonhuman supplement for both support and differentiation. The human body’s vulnerability is what prompts Valverde’s insistence on the importance of the coverings of the body, a strategy that intersects with his approach to the restoration of Vesalius’s images. The skin takes priority as a covering, and Valverde not only offers an unusually detailed account of skin but draws on the Spanish distinction between the pellejo and the pellejuelo to argue for the former’s decisive relation to the human state of embodiment. Valverde inserts a chapter in book 2 that brings together the layers of skin with the “fleshy tissue that covers the entire body” and the fat that lies between the two: “This [under skin] is midway between hard and soft, similar to a nerve full of blood, and is an entity midway between flesh and nerves (not too full of blood as flesh, nor without as the nerves) made of animated matter no less than the rest of the living parts of the body, for which reason if it breaks it cannot be soldered without leaving some sign. . . . Experience shows us the injured that have it detached, and cannot be sewn without great pain, even much greater than in any other part of the injury.”54 Unlike the first layer of skin, the second layer is not dispensable, nor is it there to provide a mere covering for the body. In fact, it seems to balance the properties of other matter—hard and soft, with less blood than flesh but more than nerves. The connection of skin to internal parts is said to be secure, and any attempt to repair its detachment, caused by injury, is extremely painful. Its blood content, together with the links to the nerves, makes this skin extremely sensitive to sensation. Yet ultimately the thickness of this skin, which B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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Valverde differentiates throughout the body, turns back to the inescapable fact that it is thinner than that of nonhuman animals. In the engravings that follow, the skinned figure continues to undergo the process of dissection. Most of the figures in Valverde’s book 2 disregard Vesalius’s attempt to keep the assemblage of the muscles as the body’s perfect form, instead slashing the muscles and opening up flaps of tissue that retain the jagged edges left by the anatomist’s knife. The claim for the importance of the body’s coverings only increases when the dissection reaches the abdomen. This section, which in Vesalius’s treatise is book 5, Valverde has moved to book 3, following immediately after the muscles. The purpose of book 3, Valverde explains, is to examine digestion and regeneration, especially “the instruments necessary to the maintenance [of the body].” At this point, the need for the body’s many wrappings in relation to its vulnerability is explicit: “The function of this cloth is to wrap, in particular all the members mentioned, and to embrace them together, so that they do not leave their place, and mainly it helps in the belly, and loins in which parts, if unfortunately they break, then the guts come out and make a kind of herd; nor are there enough muscles that cross the belly in order to defend that they do fall out, although to Vesalius it seems otherwise.”55 The susceptibility of the digestive organs to spill out of the abdomen is said to require not simply coverings but wrappings that secure the parts together. This passage even turns into an observation on the insufficiency of the muscles alone, and not without a dig at Vesalius’s privileging of this component of the body. Three figures and one body part are brought together in plate 1 of book 3, and Valverde notes that they should be observed together but that each is also numbered individually (fig. 26).56 With this staging, the three figures become a sequence in relation to the progress of the dissection and the move toward the demise of the body. In Vesalius’s figures, this is where the imaging of the dissection becomes precarious, and requires the frame of the Belvedere Torso in order to maintain unsupported dissected parts within the overall bodily form (fig. 27). This, in effect, is Harcourt’s argument about how the figures in Vesalius’s book 5 present a problem to the concept of Vesalius’s treatise because they are unable to show their function and thus become increasingly abject and in need of animation from the antique torso. In Valverde’s images, however, instead of being inserted into the reinforcing format of the ancient torso, the figures are energized by the restoration of the head and arms, although they still manage to retain a recognizable link to the ancient torso’s fragmentary identity. Valverde’s figures, unlike Vesalius’s, perform their condition, although it is a performance not of the workings of the organs but of the overall fragility of this part of the body, especially as it becomes even more exposed through the progress of the dissection. If, for Vesalius (according to Harcourt), this is where violence threatens to reveal its killing force, this is where the energy of the body is amplified for Valverde, not to conceal violence but to reveal it through the performances of the body’s escalating state of peril. 80

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Figure 26. Figures revealing viscera, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (Rome: Salamanca & Lafreri, 1556), bk. 3, plate 1. Engraving. © British Library Board, c112.f.10. Figure 27. Figure with viscera, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 5, third figure. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

In Valverde’s body under dissection, the constant discarding of matter is enacted as an aggressive performance of the removal of skin, fat, and flesh as clothing. While Vesalius’s figures stress the clear distinction between the firmness of stone sculpture and the softness of body parts, Valverde’s for the most part appear as living bodies clothed with matter from the body itself. The process of restoration enacted in Valverde’s engravings means that the boundary between stone sculpture and bodily flesh has been erased, replaced with layers of superimposed coverings that shelter internal parts of the abdomen and turn bodily matter into the body’s clothing. In the image on the upper left in figure 26, the body, now stripped to the main covering of the stomach and intestines, has been dressed with thick layers that enfold it like a coat. Vesalius’s counterpart (not illustrated here) is one of the few in this sequence that displays the still upright viscera without drawing on the sculptural frame; as if B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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to shore up the by now dangerously disintegrating body, Valverde doubles the coverings, with the upper part of the “coat” seeming to be layers from the body itself, while the lower part turns into clothing, a supplement to the body. In keeping with the restoration of ancient sculpture, the figure also has been provided with a lion’s head, which is placed on its own head as if covering and devouring it at the same time. The head of the lion seems to be continuous with the superimposed skin, as if the lion was skinned in order to use the pelt to cover the vulnerable human body. This is no random choice. The Belvedere Torso was itself usually identified as the heroic Hercules owing to the lion’s skin that still covers what remains of its right leg.57 The skinning of the animal body that covers Hercules now becomes a means of doubling the physical strength of the mythological hero that is the subject of the restoration and multiplying the protective layers of the figure under dissection. Even the ribs, which in Vesalius’s version provide some structure for the unstable body, evoke the breastplate of the warrior’s armor. While Vesalius reduces the body beyond the possibility of presence, only suggesting the shape of the ancient fragment that will appear in the following images, Valverde activates the vulnerable body with multiple forms of coverings, including the doubling of the face with a nonhuman variation. In the restoration of the images, an unexpected tension emerges between the threat of spillage from the inside of the body and the futile attempt to restrain the outer boundaries of the body. All figures share this violent confrontation, contributing to the diminishing of the body by removing protective layers while displaying the body’s determination to arrest its impending demise. The male body on the top right in figure 26 is differentiated from the heroic Hercules by being old, bearded, and clad in a turban. His performance also seems more distraught, as with one hand he holds up the upper covering to reveal part of his stomach and with the other demonstrates his exposed condition. This is the figure that shows most explicitly the threads that tie together the vulnerable area of the stomach, which according to Valverde has two mouths and is difficult to assess, as its size not only differs among people but also depends on the cycle of digestion.58 This difficulty is made even more precise by the accompanying text, which states that the front of the stomach “in this body was somewhat swollen,” suggesting the particular condition of the person dissected. Valverde explains that the stomach is formed by two tunics, also made of threads that get softer as they move further into the stomach. At this point he reveals what lies at the center of this vulnerability, the complicated internal processes of digestion and bodily transformation: “The work of the stomach is to alter the food, and turn it into nourishment, and for this reason it turns it white. The rest is all thrown out through the crossing threads, which squeeze the stomach (as do women the guts when they make sausages). So that in it (as in a kettle or pot) the food is cooked for the whole body, and for this reason it was placed among so many members, which keep it warm.”59 The metaphor of the stomach as a kitchen where food is cooked and transformed into nourishment and waste suggests the link between the 82

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body and the world, the micro- and macrocosm. In keeping with humoral theory, bodily digestion is conceived as a duplicate of the external practice of providing food, even to the point that the excess is compared to what is expelled in the process of making sausages. As Julia Kristeva writes, food consumption is very elemental to the living being’s process of maintaining life through a process of discarding of oneself: “Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere cadaver.”60 Even the parallel between the intestines and sausages seems telling. The covering of the intestines, which in the image appears as almost the full length of the torso, coated in an intertwined surface pattern, is important in that it maintains the position of the highly unstable passageways of the abdominal cavity, the intestines, together in their place with the mesentery, the membrane that attaches the intestines to the wall of the abdomen and supplies them with blood.61 Valverde states that it is made “of a folded cloth, smooth, without any threads, and strewn with many sweetbreads mixed with fat and full of veins and arteries so interspersed throughout it, that they make it resemble a net, which is why the Greeks called it Epiploon, which means entanglement.”62 The image on the bottom left of figure 26, labeled “III,” suddenly raises the level of conflict, countering what otherwise seems to belong to the unconscious process of digestion. The figure does not simply demonstrate its dismemberment; it performs it by taking the edge of the stomach tunic in its own mouth and pulling it aggressively upward. It offers a remarkable dialogue with Vesalius’s counterimage, which in order to reveal the full expanse of the internal stomach tunic has it draped over the upper part of the headless torso, turning the ideal body of the Belvedere Torso inside out (fig. 27). The contrast between the surface of the marble sculpture and the woven entanglements that seem to crawl across the body only intensifies the performance of Valverde’s ferocious figure. The accompanying text brings specificity to the aggressive gesture of the mouth by claiming that the teeth pull on the tunic in order to stretch out the covering and bring visibility to the cloth inside. But it is significant that the gesture that reveals the most vulnerable passage in the body’s digestive tract replicates the act of eating. After all, the entire body is shown to participate in its inevitable struggle between demise and survival. All the parts in the cavity of the stomach involved in digestion are conceptualized as devices for wrapping, entangling, and enmeshing the body, both internally and externally. The language offers a parallel between the workings of bodily matter and the weaving of fabric and includes variations on weaving, sewing, tissue, cloth, tunic, and thread. In the Italian translation of 1560, Valverde names the covering the reticella, which is a form of lacework in which threads are pulled from linen to make a grid upon which a pattern is then stitched.63 In the discussion of procreation that follows the section on nutrition, the threads of the tunic in which the child is wrapped are described as if woven on a loom: B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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The inside tunic is thicker than any of the many others in the body even when not pregnant. . . . The substance of this tunic is interwoven with very thick threads, and with some thin veins, like hair, which can be seen sewn throughout, which until now in no one who was not pregnant have I seen swollen (as some say) even if they die having their child, as I saw in Pisa in 1545 in a woman who had killed her son in Florence, and therefore the Duke Cosmo de Medici condemned her to be used to make an Anatomy.64

The making of cloth with thread becomes a metaphor for the making and remaking of the body, in which digestion and procreation are intertwined. The same process is shown to be at work refurbishing a diminishing body or making one anew. But once again, the discussion comes to an abrupt halt when Valverde reveals that he observed the “tunic” within which the child is nurtured in the body of a woman who had been executed for killing her child and was condemned to dissection. Death is once again the end point of the vulnerable natural body and the beginning of verifiable knowledge. How does the digestive system offer Valverde a particular opportunity to argue for the importance of the state of embodiment as a process of mutation that simultaneously makes and unmakes itself? Still following the order of Vesalius’s images, the three performative figures in figure 26 are followed by the figure (“IIII”) of a body part, the redaño/reticella, in the shape of a round container covered in intertwining veins and arteries that form a decorative clothlike pattern. In this instance, as in all depictions of body parts, restoration brings this component together with other parts through proximity rather than by clarifying its autonomous function, which in Vesalius’s treatise is done by the text. In this case, the image gains from its relation to the image directly above, in which the same organ appears but in its bodily context. On the other hand, the interruption of the agitated performance of the body’s vulnerability and sudden turn to the body’s own active agents also provides strategies for stability but at the same time raises concerns about the defectiveness of digestive devices that result in indigestion. In the exploration of the body’s mutability and constant movement toward death, the natural body opens up the possibility of intervening in its natural state. Interestingly, Valverde ends the discussion of the redaño/reticella by stating in the accompanying text that this organ resembles a hunter’s sack, in which the animals killed during the hunt are carried. In his discussion of the garments made from skins that God gives Adam and Eve, Agamben points to the association between animal skin and death.65 The Italian term for fur, pellicia, is not only a reminder of death in the Adam and Eve narrative but a part of the human condition and its imperfect relation to the world and its other creatures. The body’s enactment of a constant state of mutation, represented by the need for a covering of skin, returns us to the debate about the role of the figure itself as an agent in its own dissection. Harcourt argues that this strategy removes the surgeon’s responsibility for both the natu84

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ral process of destruction (in relation to the Belvedere Torso) and the violence of the dissection, which now rests with the object of study.66 Yet within Valverde’s treatise, concerned as it is about the embodied condition, the gesture of self-destruction points to a body engaged in a struggle of mutation, survival, and demise, rather than a person split between mind and body, one turning on the other. Moreover, the active engagement with the dissection, itself producing unexpected knowledge, hardly warrants attempts to displace the responsibility of dissection away from anatomy and its practices. On the contrary, Valverde’s implied self-imposed violence is in keeping with the natural body’s increasing proximity to death, due to the dissection, but also with violence’s being a condition of embodiment itself. The various metaphors used to think out the processes of the body’s making and unmaking—weaving, tying, cooking, covering with skins—do not separate the human body from its natural state; rather, they embed it firmly in the everyday world. Yet the presence of violence in relation to the imposition of surgical intervention is undeniable. There is an attempt to intertwine the threat to the body both in its own state and in the dissection, but frequently the latter bursts through, as the example of the woman condemned to dissection in Florence reveals only too well.

Digesting the Body In the images of Valverde’s book 3 that follow, other restorations move the figure toward annihilation as protecting layers are removed and the vulnerability of the thin skin is fully exposed. Now the viscera can no longer be contained within and are in the process of spilling outward (fig. 28). Valverde deploys the slight turn to the left of Vesalius’s torso (fig. 29) in order to extend the stretch of the neck and head back in a gesture of extreme despair. The orientation to the left accentuates the restored right arm, which turns in the opposite direction and partly conceals a hand inserted into the protective glove of a Roman athlete. The other hand cradles the mound of intestines, snakelike and intertwined, and attempts to keep them from spilling out of the body’s abdominal cavity. Another narrative is introduced here, and the Belvedere Torso becomes a Roman athlete whose powerful body has confronted its rival and is now expiring from violent disembowelment. If there was any doubt that the fierce ancient encounter and the further imposition of bodily dissection are here doubling the force of violence, the instrument held in the figure’s right hand resembles the shape of the organ—the stomach—on display at different levels of exposure on the same plate. It is even reiterated in Valverde’s usual expressive phrase in the accompanying text, which says that for a better view, the last fragment of the stomach has been slashed twice with a knife. The transformation of the intestines between the two images is remarkable, given that the organs themselves remain identical. Valverde’s restoration infuses the image with sensation and the incontestable presence of pain, in relation to both anatomical B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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Figure 28. Figure holding intestines, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (Rome: Salamanca & Lafreri, 1556), bk. 3, plate 3, fig. XI. Engraving. © British Library Board, c112.f.10. Figure 29. Figure with intestines, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 5, twelfth figure. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

dissection and the mutation of the natural body. In its evocation of pain within a body that is faithful to the ideal form of ancient sculpture, and in its rupturing of that form through the twisting trails of the intestines, this image seems to move away from the Belvedere Torso and toward the Laocoön. The recently unearthed Laocoön, already known from Pliny the Younger’s description and unusual in its agitated form of three bodies experiencing the pain and fear of being attacked by serpents, quickly became the locus of debates on the contradiction between the ideal body of ancient sculpture and the corporeal experience of pain.67 There may even have been a link between the finding of the statue and the emergence of anatomical research focused on pathology.68 This contradiction would increase in later interpretations of the sculpture, but it was already at work in the sixteenth century, in discussions on how artistic discourses denied or concealed the physical experience of the body, relying on text for knowledge that cannot be permitted in the paradigm of ideal beauty.69 The possibilities of the restoration seem 86

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Figure 30. Niccolò Boldrini (attr.), Apes Enacting the “Laocoön,” ca. 1530. Woodcut. Wikimedia Commons / Badseed.

to rest with Vesalius’s remarkable rendering of a body no less idealized for being open to the inside, or for including the turmoil of twisting intestines that seem to be unraveling the body from within. By turning from the muscular Belvedere Torso to the contorting Laocoön, Valverde returns the anatomical image to a more historically specific natural body while still retaining Vesalius’s engagement with ancient sculpture as a model for the reassemblage and enhancement of the body. The figure is now restored to the ancient ideal of the athletic body, as is fitting for the Belvedere Torso, but the figure enacts a valiant but losing struggle for survival within its spilling body. The struggle of a body unable to sustain itself in its own skin might be at work in the enigmatic sixteenth-century woodcut of three apes enacting the Laocoön as a kind of tableau vivant (fig. 30). Usually attributed to Niccolò Boldrini, who is known to have worked in Titian’s workshop, the print has been interpreted in many ways, but mostly as a satire of artists’ engagement with the Laocoön.70 The three apes perform the highly expressive gestures of pain and anguish of the Laocoön and his sons being strangled and bitten by snakes. They are set against a landscape in which they can be seen in their natural setting, in contrast to the plinthlike platform, evoking the stage of their enactment as a work of art. W. H. Janson was the first to situate the print within anatomical debates, proposing that it was Vesalius’s own response to the critique he had received for his rebuke of Galen’s use of monkeys in medical research.71 Be that as it may, the print situates antique sculpture between nature and B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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artifice and raises the question of pain within anatomy, especially how this question entangles the human and nonhuman animal. The most obvious difference between the apes in the print and the men in the sculpture is that the former are not pared down to the ideal body form of the ancient statue but are covered in long, bristly hair. The three apes’ enactment of the sculpture brings together the force of the wild animal and the pathos of pain. Their hairy pelts may seem to protect them, but their vertical position, in contrast to their counterparts on the landscape, reveals the vulnerable areas of the chest and stomach. The extra layer of skin only seems to emphasize the vulnerability of the open body, a body ready to be penetrated by the serpents, as if, having reached beyond their animalistic form, they are now being punished. The snakes twine around the bodies at their most vulnerable and enact a field of sensation that is only fully visible in the intensity of pathos that accumulates on the faces. The upward reach of the apes’ heads and their raised eyes and open mouths evoke a level of suffering that seems all the more evocative as it begins to resemble the human face. This is indeed the concern shared by those who practiced vivisection, the fact that nonhuman animals resembled human animals. The apes begin to resemble the vulnerability of the human body, perhaps more than the ancient sculpture, for the performance also seems to reveal in a forceful way something more disturbing about the interior of the body, its predisposition to experience sensation. In situating the issue of pain within the body of a simian, the print evokes the experiments carried out by anatomists on live animals to determine how different body parts react to pain. Valverde’s revision of Vesalius’s vivisection table is the first to bring into visibility the violence discussed by both anatomists, the top plank of the table now occupied with a squirming, squealing pig. The pain of vivisection could only emerge in textual description, as the practices of vivisection could not be turned into visual images without risking the reaction to the image that the Laocoön had initiated. The intersection between human and nonhuman animals is embedded in Valverde’s notion of the natural body and emerges throughout his treatise in the practices of vivisection. In the discussion of fat, Valverde explains that the removal of the first layer of skin from a human is much less arduous than the removal of the skin of a monkey or a dog thanks to the presence of fat in the human. Fat is said to belong to the humors of the body, in particular the movement of blood through the flesh, which, holding no heat, is frozen and turned into fat.72 Thus fat is associated with humid and cold animals, including the pig and the female human, which are said to have the greatest amount, in contrast to such hot and dry animals as the dog, the lion, and the monkey. The only four-legged creatures to retain fat are said to be the pig, the hedgehog, the sheep, and the lion, which have the same amount of fat as the male human. Valverde even notes that the color of fat depends on the human body’s mutation, as whiteness is more typical of the young and yellowish of the old, and he makes fun of the opinion that color has to do with the nature of air. Drawing on a 88

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wide range of animals, Valverde mixes human and nonhuman animals, separating woman and man within different animal groupings. The analogy between human and nonhuman animals becomes the primary means of gathering new information about the function of certain body parts.73 Vesalius’s own account reveals a great deal of knowledge about the internal components of certain animals in relation to vivisection that belies his usual critique of Galen’s study of the human body through apes. The animals—pig and monkey—that regularly feature as decorative features in the frontispieces of anatomical treatises pertain directly to practices of early modern vivisection and not just to the critique of Galen’s work. In Vesalius’s treatise there is considerable discussion of which animals are best to use in vivisection, and the criteria include the function of body parts in human and nonhuman animals. Vesalius claims that apes are best for the study of the heart and lungs, as they resemble humans and, like humans, they need air in the chest cavity. Sometimes the choice of animal has to do with its behavior, and Vesalius advises using a sow, a female pig that has given birth, rather than a dog, “since a dog when it has been tied for a while no matter how you make it suffer it will neither bark nor howl and you will be unable to experiment with the loss or restoration of the voice.”74 The part of the human body that Vesalius says has no counterpart in the nonhuman animal world is the brain, as no animal has reason, memory, or thought. The issue of pain lurks within the paths of vivisection, and it is through the intersections of human and nonhuman animals that pain becomes visible. There is no doubt that vivisection was controversial, and many anatomists, including Vesalius, were accused of practicing it, although this concern was mostly with the use of humans rather than other kinds of animals.75 Indeed, Katharine Park argues that fear of anatomical dissection in the sixteenth century was prompted by rumors of vivisection conducted by anatomists on human beings. She points to known cases in which prisoners asked to be handed over directly to the anatomy school rather than being executed publicly, including a case in which the anatomist Gabriele Falloppio recalled that a prisoner was turned over to him and killed with opium, procedures that enabled quick access to the body and in the process forged strong links between the anatomist and the executioner.76 Vivisection undoubtedly intensified the disturbing aspects of anatomy, not only because it called up torture before and after death on the scaffold, and may even have replaced it, but also because the separation of human and animal could not be sustained. Galen himself, while critiqued for his use of apes, advised that it was easier to use pigs than monkeys, as it was less disturbing than seeing the humanlike expression in the face of an ape. If the pig appears tied to the vivisection table in some editions of both Vesalius’s and Valverde’s treatises, it is because its intense and piercing squeals were persistent as the body moved closer to death, enabling the closer observation of internal processes. Vesalius argues for the importance of feeling with one’s own hand the involuntary movements of the body while trying to control the B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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v­ oluntary ones. Breathing and squealing are used to assess the level of sensation experienced by the body while always keeping track of the parallel to the human body. The woodcut of the apes enacting the anguished pose of Laocoön and his sons addresses just this effect, in which the unleashing of violence projects back onto the human body, which through a mixture of resemblance and difference can never be separated from the suffering of the nonhuman animal.

Doubling the Body Double The need to cover the fragile human body with skin, fat, and flesh situated the human body in an unexpectedly close relationship to the nonhuman body. But there are other substitutes for the human body, and these emerge at the ultimate point of bodily demise. In Valverde’s multiple restorations of Vesalius’s images of the viscera, the imagery of war and athletics raises yet another link between the natural body and violence. In one of the most striking examples, two of Vesalius’s antique torsos and four separate body parts, all of the intestines, are brought together in one plate (fig. 31).77 Each torso is depicted wearing a Roman cuirass, and the cuirass and intestines are interconnected through an internal support. The stomach and intestines are inserted into each cuirass, which itself retains the human form but recalls its absence. Together, they evoke the spilling out of body parts that comes with the body’s violent demise, whether in warfare or in anatomical dissection. While the dissected part remains the same as the one inserted into the Belvedere Torso in Vesalius’s treatise, it now seems to pour out of the body, no longer holding its firmness and stability. The two cuirasses in this image, one surmounting the other and implying the death and evacuation of the body, recall the Roman war trophy, a recurrent feature in several of the prints usually included in the Speculum Romanae. The trophies of Marius, mentioned by Aldrovandi, who saw them in the Esquiline and believed that they had been erected in relation to violent military action, are a case in point (fig. 32).78 The large-scale sculptures were removed in 1590 on the order of Sixtus V and installed at the Campidoglio as part of the systematization of the space by Giacomo della Porta.79 The trophies continued to raise much debate on their identity and history, but in the print within the Speculum Romanae they stand for both heroic warfare and bodily restoration.80 Each trophy presents an elaborate reassemblage of the fragmented body. Hung from a tree in an open field, this assemblage of armor and weapons of war takes the form of a gigantic and monstrous human body. The body is both fragmented, in that it is composed of incongruous parts, and extended, in that it is composed of multiple bodies, especially those made captive or dismembered in battle. The trophy is imagined not as form of commemoration or triumph but as a substitute warrior, planted on a battlefield in order to mark the end of violent engagement and bring under control the demons unleashed by war.81 90

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Figure 31. Intestines with cuirass, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (Rome: Salamanca & Lafreri, 1556), bk. 3, plate 2. Engraving. © British Library Board, c112.f.10. Figure 32. Trophy of Marius, from Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (n.p.: Lafreri, ca. 1550), 54. Engraving. © British Library Board, c77.i.11.

How does Valverde’s translation of the Belvedere Torso into a kind of double body consecrated to death in warfare enable one to see and accommodate the natural body as flesh in a state of transformation? Perhaps it is useful to probe the implications of the war trophy as a site in which to address an agitated, bodiless soul. The heroic warrior who is consecrated in battle and enters into a pact with divine powers in order to save his community offers an intriguing concept through which to consider the early modern project of anatomy.82 In Roman military ritual, if the warrior’s body was lost or excessively mutilated during battle, and especially if the warrior remained alive, then it could not be given a proper funeral since the warrior had not fulfilled his vow of death. The Romans would construct an effigy—a double— that enabled the relations between the living and the dead to be realigned. In this narrative, the dismembered body may be visualized within the honorific associations B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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of the Roman warrior. It also raises the question of the sacrifice of the individual body for the collective good and perhaps translates this ideal from the sacred into the secular. Yet it also produces anxieties about the implications of the dismemberment of the human body and its troubled transition to death, and makes issues of mutilation and pain an overt part of the narrative of dissection. In reworking Vesalius’s images that struggle to maintain bodily coherence, Valverde’s treatise moves beyond standard strategies of restoration and reframes two sequential woodcuts as one, producing an intermediary image between the two (fig. 33). Instead of compensating for what the dissection has taken away, the two figures are brought together and enact upon each other. What had been violently upheld—the boundaries of the individual body, the separate stages of dissection, the distinction between anatomist and anatomized—is now just as violently dismantled, turning the act of dissection itself into an opportunity to reconsider how embodiment operates relationally rather than within an individual autonomous body. Relocated to a full-page plate, the two figures are now surrounded by body fragments in the order in which they are found scattered in Vesalius’s treatise.83 It is a unit that turns dissection into cannibalism. Even after Valverde’s multiple attempts at incorporation, the interruption in the sequence of Vesalius’s images is shocking. The two images in question initiate Vesalius’s book 6, on the heart, and thus start the process of dissection that will pursue the heart to its deepest point. These figures are unusual in that they are the only ones in the treatise that register their status as dead, although at different stages in the process. The first figure is laid out horizontally, and the body, deprived of limbs and inner parts, seems to be turning to the stone upon which his head lies (fig. 34). The second figure, however, stands vertically, arms and hands tied tightly behind his back, rope curving around his neck, and lungs expanded with a force that rips the chest apart as the head turns, the face revealing a grimace of pain (fig. 8).84 This figure is located both before (still dying) and after (at a more advanced state of dissection) the other. As noted in the introduction, the figure retains traces of punishment for transgressions against the state, and in doing so it moves very quickly from execution to dissection. Indeed, the noose that has stopped the breath of life has caused an inner explosion, opening up the body for inspection. In the process, the strings of the trousers have popped open, echoing the cut of the ribs, which twist back together with the ribcage as if they too have been ripped apart by the inner force of the body. What a contrast to the first, lifeless figure, which comes closest in Vesalius’s treatise to representing the problem of the deteriorating corpse. There is a curious reversal between text and image; the text follows the sequence of the dissection and thus moves toward dismemberment, while the image moves from the dissecting table back to the scaffold, and from complete annihilation to the moment when the breath of life is brutally extinguished before our eyes. When the two figures are reassembled into a single body, this temporal reversal only becomes greater. The first figure remains horizontal and inanimate and now even 92

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Figure 33. Two figures joined in dissection, from Juan de Valverde de Amusco, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (Rome: Salamanca & Lafreri, 1556), bk. 4, plate 1. Engraving. © British Library Board, c112.f.10.

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Figure 34. Figure with internal cavity exposed, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543), bk. 6, first figure, p. 559. Woodcut. © British Library Board, c54.k.12.

more deflated, as all body hair is removed, as if the figure’s strength has been fully depleted. The second figure is now not simply in close proximity to life but has returned to life, freed himself of his bindings, and usurped the authority of the anatomist. But instead of cutting into the body with instruments, he boldly inserts his hands into the open chest cavity, plunging them into the raw flesh and uniting his fingers with inner parts of the body. With the cut ribs of both figures mirroring each other, the repetition of the similar shape in the fingers of the two hands links the two bodies as one. If the first follows the sequence of dissection, the second figure represents a later stage in the sequence and must be doing to the other what has already been done to himself, opening the upper chest cavity to reveal the heart beneath. Yet he is about to turn the other into himself and move the other further into the process of dissection but also closer to life. If Vesalius’s separate images suggest a move back from death to life by approximating the heart, the source of life, Valverde’s assemblage suggests that life can also infect death, animate the dead, and thus produce a state of the undead. Valverde offers in the captions his usual clarification of what is on display of the images, describing how bodily matter, especially the ribcage, has been cut and bent outward in order to enable a better view deep into the chest.85 But there is no mention of the dramatic conflation of multiple figures, or, rather, of the multiplication of the singular body of dissection. Instead, the text and captions trace the many layers that have been removed from the body’s chest cavity to enable the observation of internal parts. If this image opens up a different space between life and death, it is because it is directed to the dissection of the heart, which both Vesalius and Valverde identify as the source of life, as it shelters the spirits that generate breath, the pulse, 94

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and the heartbeat. Vesalius considers the heart the site of the “vital spirit,” although his attempts to locate this sprit in the physical heart are not satisfactory.86 The new interest in the material substance of the human body did not obliterate the prevailing idea of the body’s spirits being deep within the body but put it closer to the material flesh. As Richard Sugg has stated, while theology tended to argue that the spirits bound the body to the soul but were different from the soul, this distinction was constantly blurred.87 Valverde proposes that the life-giving spirits emerge through the vapor of the blood and the intake of air through the mouth and nose, and thus are produced in the relation between inside and outside. This is the constant intersection of the body involved in vivisection, which is about the possibility of seeing life within the material body, not by reaching a particular location in the heart itself but by seeing the relationship between inside and outside. The effects of vivisection are on the surface— for instance, in the face of the ape—and may be more difficult to confront than the inside precisely because they bring pain to the surface. The figure with his hands inside another (fig. 33) is not expecting to see the effect of the spirits by looking deep inside the chest. We are encouraged to look, but only as parts are removed and displayed, becoming in turn another surface, not unlike the surface of the face. The figure turns his face aside, offering a lively countenance in contrast to the face that has now been replaced with his own. We are confronted with a juxtaposition of the surface animation of the face and the inside source of this animation, the heart. But this juxtaposition is undermined when one notices that the heart is another kind of face, another outside with its own interior to be revealed. Thus the inside is also an outside, and as we move from one image to the next, the peeling of layers takes place until there is nothing left of life. It seems that what is always there is a reflective surface rather than the actual location of the spirits, and it is only on this surface that life can be seen until all layers are spent. One figure puts his hands into the other, about to dig in and pull out his own heart, or maybe he has already done so. After all, the figure is looking outward toward the multiplication of the layers of the heart, already laid out for visual observation on the page. Through the revelation of layers, the heart is becoming knowledge, yet it is also still within the body. We can almost envision the personal revenge or official punishment, entailing the most extreme forms of physical violence, culminating in or even starting with the tearing out of the heart. Such violent acts are associated with cannibalism, discussed in the next chapter—none more so than Jean de Léry’s comparison of the practice of cannibalism in the New World with the crowd that tore out a man’s heart and ate it during the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The two figures reassembled by Valverde are ultimately brought back to life, to the public scaffold in the city square, confronting the cutting of the heart, multiplying through the repetition of dismemberment, disregarding the boundaries of the individual body, and becoming cannibal. B o d i ly M u tat i o n

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Chapter 3

Bones in Transit, Flesh in Shreds Anatomy and the New World Cannibal

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y starting the account of the “New World” with Adam and Eve, Theodor de Bry’s volumes on the Americas signal a return to the Fall, not necessarily to the same place and time, but certainly to the transgression that drove the first man and woman out of Eden (fig. 35).1 In the most renowned volume, published in 1592 and recounting various journeys taken by Europeans to Brazil, the transgression of divine dietary prohibitions moves from biblical Genesis to the cannibalistic narratives of the Tupinamba people.2 The desire for the cold indigestible apple of Paradise now becomes the desire for the hot indigestible flesh of the New World. The anatomical image entered the territory of the cannibal long before de Bry staged the performance of cannibalism in his volume on Brazil.3 With the increasing visibility of violence in the expanding geographies of European economic and missionary activity, the cannibal became the anatomical body’s troubling double, the two frequently joining forces in the turbulent exchanges between Europe and the Americas. The term cannibal may initially have been ascribed to those in the New World by those in the Old World, but, as H. E. Martel notes, “Real or not, the cannibal took a charismatic and leading role in the theatre of imperial violence and was used by all sides in the conflict.”4 The lack of respect for boundaries usually attributed to cannibals didn’t divide the savage from the civilized as much as it opened up cross-cultural exchange to excessive violence. When conjoined with the displaced identity of the dissected body, the cannibal and the criminal engaged in the realignment of natural and civil law.5 Criminality was regarded as a regression from civil to natural law, and as physical punishment began to be replaced with exile, and people were deported to distant lands that were conceived as being both uninhabited and filled with cannibals, the two became neighbors.6 In a state of nature, in which anarchy and conflict were said to reign without legal constraints, cannibalism and the exiled criminal were regarded as the ultimate stage of social breakdown. According to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the right to commit any violent act in order to survive in the state of nature is not only justified on the grounds of necessity but associated with the right to natural liberty. As Cătălin Avramescu claims, “In his strangeness, the cannibal is sovereign over a species of freedom.”7 Few images of cannibalism evoke this mixture of scorn and desire as effectively as that of the Tupinamba’s brazen performance around a large grill, fire ablaze and laden with roasting body parts (fig. 36).8 Agitated but resolute, the men and women in this image seize and chew human body parts, becoming indistinguishable from one another and from the body parts that they are devouring. The eating of flesh produces a collective and even imparts hierarchies and distinctions.9 Women keep to the left side of the grill, seizing severed limbs but reserving most of their masticating for their own hands and arms, as if substituting one body for another. Men spread out on the other side and not only chomp aggressively on diverse body parts but also prop them up so as to expose, and even flaunt, the bleeding flesh that they consume. A child is initiated into the ritual by chewing the fingers of a hand. The 97

Figure 35. Adam and Eve, from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae (Frankfurt: Theodor de Bry, 1592). Engraving. © British Library Board, c115.h.2. Figure 36. Cannibal feast, from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae (Frankfurt: Theodor de Bry, 1592), 179. Engraving. © British Library Board, c115.h.2.

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flesh being eaten has been grilled but still reveals its close proximity to the living body. The severed fragments continue to emit internal fluids, and some of the fingers even appear to grip the grating as they roast. Yet the annihilation of the body is total, as the fully fleshed fragments expose bones that have been hacked without regard for their own natural divisions. Only one visible bone remains intact—and entirely bare—the single rib held by the man at the extreme right. This rib is clean beyond what seems possible, even by the most determined cannibal. Extricated from the flesh of the body and from the set of ribs that forms the structure of the body, this rib recalls the making of Eve from the rib of Adam, but in reverse. The exposed rib is the end and the beginning of the body and returns the scene of cannibalism to the start of the biblical account of creation. For the witness—the German traveler Hans Staden, who stands just behind the feasting group, apart yet in close proximity—the cannibal implies difference in the strongest possible terms. The performance staged here is not just that of the Tupinamba but also of the Christian outsider, who repeatedly appears in de Bry’s volumes as the upholder of Christian virtue and must repudiate the eating of the human body.10 In the cannibal feast, Staden demonstrates his distinctiveness with a performance of his vulnerability as a captive of the Tupinamba.11 Staden’s state of nakedness might link him to the cannibal, but he enacts a more defenseless form of denuding and, like a martyr, fights for virtue in the wilderness rather than in the unruly natural world occupied by the cannibals. In the colored version of the print, even his skin color is differentiated from the rest. The martyr may not yet be uncovered beyond the skin, but he holds this potential, and he is willing to expose his unprotected body even while being in a world that is far from God’s grace. Yet for all of Staden’s efforts, difference remains primarily on the surface. I argue that the cannibal forms a dialogue that has a tendency to link Europe with others, not only with people in different parts of the world but also with diverse practices pertaining to the human body. In the display of severed body parts roasting on the grill, it is not difficult to discern the rituals of European relics. Within the soaring flames and the billowing smoke stoked by a man with bellows, an image of Saint Lawrence being grilled alive emerges, along with the display of multiple body-part relics.12 The body of the martyr, like the cannibal fragments, is invigorated rather than destroyed through the transformative force of the flames. This is not to say that the body returns to its previous state and becomes whole again. In the image, the ability of a bone relic to evoke the whole person has been undermined through the cutting of the bones, and it is even unclear how many bodies are being eaten, or whether the body parts add up to a whole. But the grill, with its raging fire, provides the flesh with lifelike warmth, succulence, and color, thus suggesting the display of body relics—and the very process of becoming a relic. The roasting hands that seem to continue to grip the grill suggest the reinvigoration of the martyr through the suffering of the body, and the continued ability of the fragment—once it becomes B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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relic—to activate the presence of the sacred body. In the context of European religious conflict, this image held the potential to double the cannibalization of the body, which now can be seen as enacted by both “New World” cannibals and “Old World” Catholics. The two have become linked, not only through the brutal dismemberment of the desired body but also through a notion of a future in which that body will be transformed and in turn transform other bodies. In the process, the vocabulary of cannibalism has become a means to articulate the corruption surrounding Catholic relics. In effect, the cannibal feast turns the cannibal body into the sacred body of the relic, impure in its promiscuous multiplicity of ever-increasing body parts. Staden’s disavowal of eating human flesh differentiates him from Catholic rituals of the body as much as from Tupinamba cannibalism. The cannibal’s vocabulary was formed through familiar European cultural codes, yet it held the potential to signify in unexpected ways and thus to produce something new. Analogy was its main syntax, activated by what Foucault called the culture of resemblance, whether between things across vast distances or things in close proximity.13 In Michel de Montaigne’s celebrated 1580 essay “Of Cannibals,” the cannibal is invariably elusive and only gains visibility as he moves back and forth across vast distances.14 According to Michel de Certeau, for Montaigne, the cannibal is a figure who disappears from afar only to reappear nearby.15 Montaigne’s essay draws on Jean de Léry’s account of his journey to Brazil in 1538, especially the description of Tupinamba practices of cannibalism, which Léry had transposed to Europe, comparing them to the acts of violence reported during the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France.16 For Montaigne, moving the cannibal from a foreign culture to one’s own made it possible for a comparative interpretation of social norms and an ethical critique of the self: “I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of their acts, but I am heartily sorry that we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.”17 The European preoccupation with Tupinamba cannibalism has been attributed to the ideological importance of cannibalism in European cultures rather than to what travelers actually observed in the New World.18 For example, Montaigne’s idea that the Tupinamba only ate prisoners who had been valiant in war in order to consume their essence is in keeping with European medicinal practices in which components of the human corpse, especially blood, were prescribed as a means of enhancing the body’s life force.19 But anxieties about the fragmentation of the body were also part of this European preoccupation with cannibalism. In the accounts of travelers to Brazil published in de Bry’s volume—and especially in its images—the rupturing of bodily boundaries defined the cannibal just as it defined Vesalius’s bodily assemblage. Moreover, both shared the enthralling transformative possibilities of fragmentation itself. While seeming to belong in entirely different worlds, the image of the cannibal and the image of anatomical dissection both speak in an 100

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experimental visual language that stimulates the possibility of overcoming civil constraints, of exercising free will through the body’s physical capabilities, and of bringing into question the biblical account of origins. The proximity of the cannibal body to the image of Adam and Eve in de Bry’s Americae (fig. 35) evokes the state of nature at the time of the Fall as well as the cannibal’s place within it. In the background of the engraving, Adam and Eve are shown engaged in hard labor—Eve feeds her child under a flimsy shelter and Adam works the land with a simple tool. In the context of the overall travel account, these biblical scenes seem no less ethnographically descriptive than those of the hardworking Tupinamba preparing their cannibal feast.20 Each act of disobedience initiates new bodies and new worlds that no longer fit into established biblical knowledge: uncultivated landscapes occupied by curious animals and vegetation, human bodies of elegant appearance but questionable actions and unpredictable consequences, and ways of life in which habitation remains transient and embryonic. According to Michael Gaudio, the image of Adam and Eve was inserted into de Bry’s volume in order to secure the origin of the people in the New World within biblical Genesis. To address the concern that the peoples of the Americas might not be descended from Adam and Eve, de Bry draws a comparison between the word as the foundation of scripture and the Algonquin body tattoo, regarding the latter as the primitive version of the former.21 Knowledge of the New World, writes Gaudio, would be produced through a temporal difference between Europe and the Americas, a relation that became the basis of ethnography and formed the European narrative of progress from past to present and from savage to civilized. The cannibal’s disturbance of religious scripture was intertwined with the anatomical image’s attempts to challenge the biblical account of creation in order to open up new possibilities for the study of the natural human body. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nature and the natural body were conceived as naked, which is to say untouched by human artifice.22 Eve was associated with nature while still in the state of grace, but after eating the forbidden fruit her nakedness became part of her unprotected human flesh, entailing a complicated process of covering and uncovering of her natural body. The performance of denuding, according to Giorgio Agamben, never reaches completion and only produces the desire for further revelation of the body.23 In de Bry’s engraving of the cannibal feast, this desire is most evident in the Tupinamba women’s enactment of the denuding of the body. Already entirely divested of clothing, they continue the performance by taunting the viewer with gestures of nibbling and chewing their own hands. By mocking the very act of eating flesh, they produce a body already revealed to the viewer as being beyond the skin. The older women at the back of the grill display a particularly fierce attitude to denuding, a distinction mentioned by European travel reports and indicated in the image by the pendent breasts and facial expressions associated in Europe with the uncontrolled behavior of witches.24 Interestingly, the B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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men’s nakedness seems to reassert the boundary of the skin as the key surface in the process of denuding. Their nakedness is partial but even more provocative for being overlaid with painted decoration that includes attached feathers and probably tattoos.25 The tattoo and even the body paint hold a transitional place in that they are both on the inside and the outside of the skin, pinpointing precisely the crucial shift from the nakedness of the natural state to the nakedness of cannibalism. The decorated skin reinforces the vulnerable naked skin but also opens it to its environment, linking it to the land and the nonhuman animal. Jean de Léry, whose account of his time with the Tupinamba was first published in 1578—twenty years after his return to France—and then in de Bry’s 1592 volume, writes about the naked state of the Tupinamba in unusually positive terms. He evokes a state of paradisiac harmony, stating that the people were well-formed, healthy, and youthful, and that they did not consider the naked body to be lewd, erotic, or shameful.26 Liz Rountree has linked Léry’s attitude toward Tupinamba nudity to a nascent form of ethnography. She suggests that, unlike other travelers, Léry uses the issue of nudity to challenge the expectations of French culture and to build a framework with which to compare the Old World with the New. Léry’s selfaware engagement with the Tupinamba is, according to Rountree, in keeping with his interest in curiosities and wonders and a conception of the world in terms of diversity rather than unity, a conception that proved an important challenge to the narrative of human origins in the book of Genesis.27 In fact, Léry acknowledges the impossibility of fitting Tupinamba practices within European categories. He states that he does not wish to contradict the biblical account of Adam and Eve’s shame in their nakedness, but that even after twenty years he cannot forget that the “gestures and expressions [of the Tupinamba] are so completely different from ours, that it is difficult, I confess, to represent them well by writing or by pictures.”28 In acknowledging his inability to comprehend and thus to categorize the Indigenous people he encountered during his time in Brazil, Léry is not alone, but he is unusual in his awareness of the limits of what can be turned into knowledge. The study of anatomy, of course, shared these difficulties as it struggled to deal with the body’s experiential and transitory components. Both anatomical and travel treatises confronted the problem of producing visual images to accompany new knowledge. In the case of the anatomical image, the initial strategy, and the one adopted in Vesalius’s treatise, was to exclude all physical matter that could not be contained or fixed. In images of New World inhabitants, a gap emerged between the first textual descriptions and the production of viable visual images.29 The earliest images were criticized for following too closely the details of witness accounts or for reusing established tropes of the monstrous body. Hans Staden’s 1557 account, which includes fifty-four linear woodcuts, is rich in ethnographic information and proved an important visual source, but by the end of the sixteenth century it was replaced by the more performative de Bry engravings.30 102

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The engravings in Theodor de Bry’s volumes have received considerable scholarly attention, although most has been about identifying the early modern visual sources rather than about the relationship between witness accounts and visual vocabulary.31 These images share certain strategies with anatomical images, including the deployment of antique sculpture to represent the most extreme state of bodily disintegration. As a supportive armature, the antique model both manages difference and retains a gap between the particularities of textual descriptions and the homogeneity of the idealized antique model, allowing for some mental adjustment between the two.32 Yet ethnographic information—the tonsurelike shaved male heads, the female gesture of chewing one’s own hand, the surface body decoration—cannot be fully assimilated into the model provided by European antique sculpture. The transformative potential of antique sculpture, especially in relation to practices of restoration, offers some flexibility, but the points of connection between the two, whether the attachment of living body parts to the Belvedere Torso in Vesalius’s images or the relationship between the comportment of the idealized body and the unruly movement of the Tupinamba in de Bry’s images, reveal the incongruity of diverse visual vocabularies. Intriguingly, both Vesalius’s forceful mechanistic body and Valverde’s vulnerable natural body find a place in de Bry’s cannibal, which is a body transformed through the violence of external physical force and internal digestive processes. In addition to Vesalius’s fragmentation, the cannibal partakes of Valverde’s conversion of the body through digestion. Indeed, the chewing, swallowing, ingesting, and expelling of the state of embodiment is no less violent than the cutting, disemboweling, and boiling through which the cannibal body itself is turned into food. Although the cannibal uses other instruments to impose its will over an enemy, none is as fierce or as destructive as the human teeth, which can chew flesh right down to the bone. The cannibal, as an instrument of violence, intersects with anatomical theories that conceived of digestion as a model of collective production and reproduction.33 The process of digestion took on new complications in debates about biblical Genesis, both by defenders of Genesis and by those who offered alternative interpretations. The loss of perfection in the body due to the Fall was said to have made the digestive system faulty and left the body corrupt, especially owing to the unpredictable intestines and stomach.34 According to Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century physician, chemist, astrologer, and toxicologist, before the Fall, digestion involved the complete dissolution of food, but the eating of the apple impaired the digestive tract.35 Food became toxic, as it contained dangerous invaders that the weakened power of digestion was unable to subjugate. Paracelsus argued that the stomach had developed a process of alchemy, through which the poisonous and nourishing parts of food were divided.36 Others claimed instead that since the prelapsarian body did not have digestive organs with which to separate poisonous foods, the coldness of the apple permanently disrupted the process of digestion. Robert Burton, however, B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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in his 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy, claimed that fruit was the one food that could cool down the hot fumes produced in the stomach.37 By the time John Milton published Paradise Lost in 1667, paradisiacal indigestion was associated with the search for knowledge, and in Milton’s account, Adam and Eve experience indigestion the night after eating the forbidden fruit, suggesting that the body was unable to cope with the implications of limitless knowledge.38 Milton proposed that the production of food and its preparation, both responsibilities of Eve, were in place before the Fall and were crucial to the formation of social order and civilized life.39 Indigestion emerges as a marker of the body, not only of its shift from being under God’s grace to being in the state of nature, but also of its relation to knowledge and its judicious application. The body’s digestive system, especially the function of the intestines, would thus become implicated in what Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process,” linking the disciplining of the body to its digestive functions.40 This was only a step away from the political deployment of the body’s troublesome digestive system, which was used to justify the deportation of people to penal colonies in the eighteenth century by arguing for the need to expel bodily waste in order to ensure the well-being of the body politic.41 Indigestion has further implications, especially in relation to the formation of early modern knowledge and to the cannibal as an unpredictable figure who was part of a harsh and overwhelming nature but who also harbored an underlying desire for “anti-civil freedom.”42 A concern with the cannibal as a subject of study was expressed in the preface to Hans Staden’s 1557 account of his time with the Tupinamba, written by the anatomist Johann Dryander. The preface does not deal directly with anatomy or even with cannibalism, but Dryander was particularly concerned with Staden’s role as an eyewitness and with how his account of cannibalism is related to observation during Staden’s captivity with the Tupinamba.43 According to Dryander, Staden’s level of participation was crucial, as he must have been close enough to observe his captors, and perhaps even to try to intervene, while guarding against being seduced by the illicit and dissolute activities of the Tupinamba. Dryander points to Staden’s claims that he refused to eat human flesh, even feigning various physical conditions, such as toothache, in order not to eat.44 We know that Staden survived his time in Brazil by altering his allegiances depending on his situation, and that he tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the Tupinamba that he was French rather than German or Portuguese, as they suspected.45 Staden deployed strategies to adjust his identity not only while in Brazil but also after returning to Europe. Martel explains that although Staden played many roles, he kept his Protestant affinity and presented his captivity as a means of personal redemption.46 Taking an ethnographic approach to the formation of knowledge, Dryander argues that Staden, by coming so close to endangering his own salvation, demonstrated that the production of knowledge is as valid as the level of personal risk. 104

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Knowledge about the body opened up by travel and cross-cultural encounters was indeed all about risk. According to Katharine Park, the concept of nature changed in relation to modes of producing knowledge, and the role of the naturalist as interpreter came to the foreground with notions of nature as embodied and thus as unable to convey knowledge directly.47 The same can be said of the recasting of the natural body in the New World, which, while produced in European publications intended for European audiences, was formed within ongoing conflicts and exchanges between Europe and the Americas. The state of embodiment in relation to the cannibal body altered the relation between violence and the body, which splintered into a focus on the moment of bodily destruction through the display of flesh and blood, and on bone through the display of encounters with the remnants of cannibalism.48 In de Bry’s publications, it is the defleshing of the body—the initial moment of bodily consumption and annihilation—that most consistently defines the encounter between different cultures. But in other contexts, the effects of violence emerge as a memory, one in which violence is transformed as it is scattered within expanding geographical networks.49 In the exchanges between Indigenous populations and European intruders—missionaries, traders, and travelers—the figure of the cannibal was activated by the presence of bone and the confrontation with the aftermath of cannibal ritual. But because rituals of bone that entailed the dismemberment of the body were shared by all of the communities in question, they offered a site of exchange with unexpected consequences.50 The transportation of Catholic relics to the New World and the shipping of missionary human remains across the world and back to Rome for the official verification of martyr status replayed earlier traditions of the making of the relic through dangerous journeys, but now through intense relations with the bone rituals of the inhabitants of the natural world. In the representation of the cannibal in European accounts of travel to the New World, the reconsideration of embodiment through the split between flesh and bone reveals how the cannibal became the anatomical image’s most feared double. The cannibal’s complex histories, entailing cross-cultural exchanges, ethnographic knowledge, and imaginative visual inventions, incorporated and stored a huge amount of contested and undigested matter, matter that has retained its contradictions and even now cannot be fully appropriated or entirely digested.51

Defleshing and Indigestion The account of cannibalism in Theodor de Bry’s 1592 Americae is the tale of a new and uncompromising body, one that challenges the Bible’s origin story and reconsiders the moment of indigestion that followed Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience. The clash between Genesis and the New World was predicated on the dislocating effects of the journey. De Bry’s narrative charts elaborate departures, uncertain routes, terrifying storms, dangerous encounters, the perils of arrival, and B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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Figure 37. Frontispiece from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae (Frankfurt: Theodor de Bry, 1592). Engraving. © British Library Board, c115.h.2.

most of all an increasing uncertainty about the experience of time and space. Within these dislocating movements, a new body emerges, one constructed through exchanges that defined one world as old and the other as new. De Bry’s volume on Brazil carries a particular brief, the unmaking of the individual body, taking on board Vesalius’s ready-made model of energetic disintegration. In the frontispiece of Americae tertia pars, the traditional architectural portal marks the threshold of the natural world of the cannibal (fig. 37).52 Instead of Adam and Eve, the first inhabitants of the natural world, the man and woman who appear in the niches that frame the title, chew on severed human limbs. Each is transformed in the process of consuming the limb, but in different ways. The woman is already turning into a composite creature; her head is doubled by the head of the child whom she carries but who seems to emerge from her own neck, and her long twisting hair braid entangles the bodies by seeming to belong to both. The severed limb that she holds appears to be continuous with her own, and she chews on its hand, recalling Léry’s description of Tupinamba women gnawing on their own hands as a form of mock greeting designed to incite European fears of cannibalism. The repetition of this striking gesture throughout the narrative cycle brings to the women’s 106

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performance a difference that proves not only audacious but also, arguably, beyond what the antique model of the body is able to sustain. The link between the severed limb and the male figure is bolder and more provocative but perhaps less strange. The cut of the leg is exposed and even flaunted; the inner flesh bleeds, the severed bone projects beyond the flesh, and, instead of being aligned with the body, the leg is held impudently to the man’s mouth. In order to demonstrate the transformation of his body through his consumption of human flesh, the cannibal is marked with a set of regular serrations on the upper chest, thighs, and upper arms. Both Staden and Léry explain that those who have killed and enabled the sharing of human flesh with the community have incisions on their chest and thighs; once these wounds have drawn blood, they are rubbed with a mixture of black powders that seeps into the body and can never be erased.53 These markings, which literally transgress the division between inside and outside, accumulate over the years, and while the particular warrior is “esteemed the more valiant by the others,” the communal cannibal body continues to expand.54 The male cannibal in de Bry’s frontispiece splits into two bodies, the energetic and potent warrior emerging from the niche and casting a shadow that appears to emit its own darker energy. In effect, the shadow becomes the extended accumulation of bodily violence, including exchanges of blood and flesh in the past and future. Its transformation through palpable bodily energy resembles that of Vesalius’s anatomical body, which gains strength as its parts are disassembled, although now it is incorporation rather than separation that produces this force. Cannibalism, like anatomical dissection, is not a procedure as much as a collective body in transition, one that entails destruction in order for a new amalgamation to emerge. In European images of the Tupinamba, the incorporation of the body turns the external (enemy warrior) into the internal (the community), a process embedded within European culture, even though it is usually accompanied by attempts to retain a clear division between the two. To mark the body as cannibal, as already a composite of internal and external components, visual strategies of mirroring, doubling, and juxtaposing are usually deployed. In Jean de Léry’s narrative, the cannibal’s process of transformation is implied in the superimposition of multiple bodies that become an assemblage (fig. 38). The composite body can now be seen from various angles: front and profile, posing and walking, still as sign and moving as narrative. The instruments of violence are different, but together they embrace both the work of the warrior and the ritual of the cannibal. The new body has multiple heads, arms, and legs, and various options to enact shared roles. If Vesalius’s anatomical image draws on the repetition of a single body in order to animate it, the cannibal image brings multiple bodies together and gains energy from its state of incoherence. In this assemblage, the severed head that lies discarded on the ground cannot be excluded, as it is a crucial part of the overall transformative process of cannibalism. Within the de Bry sequence of images that constitute the narrative of cannibalism, the head of the cannibalized body lies on the ground, displaced from its lofty B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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Figure 38. Tupinamba warriors, from Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (La Rochelle, 1578), 207. Engraving. © British Library Board, 1052.a.16.

position in antique sculpture. Judging from witness accounts, it seems that the head had an ambiguous place in Tupinamba rituals of dismemberment. The cannibal favored well-shaped limbs and sections of the torso but was less drawn to parts of the body considered to be less digestible, including the head, which, according to witness accounts, marked very precisely the moment between life and death. Léry explains, “He who is there ready to perform this slaughter lifts his wooden club with both hands and brings down the rounded end of it with such force on the head of the poor prisoner that—just as our butchers slay oxen over here—I have seen some who fell stone dead on the first blow, without ever after moving an arm or a leg. . . . [They] usually hit the skull so accurately and aim so precisely at the spot behind the ear that while scarcely shedding any blood, they need no more than one try to end a life.”55 Léry adds that the Tupinamba’s expression for killing is “I’ll break your head.” The cannibal’s skill is given full credit in a form of execution that resembles the European notion of decapitation as quick and painless, while also differentiating itself from the display of bodily excess and waste that accompanied European executions: “to satisfy their ferocity, everything that can be found in the bodies of such prisoners, from the tips of the toes up to the nose, ears, and scalp, is entirely eaten by 108

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Figure 39. The preparation of mingau, from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae (Frankfurt: Theodor de Bry, 1592), 127. Engraving. © British Library Board, c115.h.2.

them; all except, however, the brain, which they do not touch at all.”56 The male cannibal body is itself conceived as a weapon, a point suggested in the frontispiece by the parallel between cannibal and the club used to strike and kill the person about to be eaten. The ethnographically oriented Staden concurs that the Tupinamba were frequently suspicious of the condition of the head, and he tells of a slave named Carios kept by the Tupinamba who was killed when he became ill, and how after they hit him in the head and cut off his head, “They ate all of him except for the head and the intestines, which they loathed because he had been ill.”57 In cannibal execution, the head, far from being the privileged part of the body, becomes dangerous owing in part to the brain, which in its materiality shares the unstable properties of the intestines. It so happens that the other part of the body that is frequently mentioned as treated somewhat apart within cannibal rituals is the digestive organs, especially the intestines. According to Léry, the work of preparing the cannibal meal was shared between men and women, but women did most of the work needed to make the human body hygienic for consumption, including scrubbing its surfaces and blocking its openings, such as the anus, so as to stop the discharge of bodily waste.58 The men skinned, gutted, and chopped up the body, B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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Figure 40. Women and children eating mingau, from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae (Frankfurt: Theodor de Bry, 1592), 128. Engraving. © British Library Board, c115.h.2.

passing the viscera to the women, who, according to Staden, used these parts to make a souplike mixture called mingau (fig. 39).59 This entailed boiling the viscera in a big cauldron, usually with green pepper, for a very long time, and the ensuing beverage, unlike the main cannibal feast, which was shared with the entire community, was consumed by women and children, who drank it “out of gourds.” De Bry’s images give considerable visibility to the making of mingau, perhaps because it is here, in this mixture in need of purifying by boiling, that the head returns to the transformative rituals of cannibalism. In the process, the grueling work of cannibalism begins to resemble the treatment of the body in the context of medical study, revealing the scrubbing, cutting, scraping, pressing, pulling, and even boiling of the decapitated head that anatomy kept at bay. One of the most unsettling images in de Bry’s narrative of cannibalism is of the mingau feast (fig. 40), a very different feast than the one that takes place around the grill with roasting body parts. It happens to be the only scene devoid of men; it depicts ten women seated on the ground in a circle, partaking of mingau with their children.60 The setting is the same stagelike space, surrounded by long thatched cabins, in which other cannibal rituals are staged, but the gathering now seems to be 110

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more private and not performed for outsiders. In relation to Staden’s image, upon which this engraving is based, the scene has lost its spontaneity as well as the logic of being accessed by a witness.61 The simplicity of Staden’s linear format effectively conveys its place within cannibal rituals, as the women and children huddle together on an unkempt hillside and quickly consume the soup. In de Bry’s translation, this moment has become a well-organized domestic gathering in which women share a meal and tend to their young. Staden’s eight women have expanded to ten in de Bry’s image, and they claim the full space not by performing for an audience but by constituting a community through the ultimate fragmentation of the body. Staden’s image resonates via the shared experience of the need for food, but de Bry’s is staged to reveal the external order that produces internal incoherence—not that the divide between inside and outside is entirely maintained. Some of the women wear necklaces and bracelets made of bone nuggets, although these are pleasingly combined with elaborate twisting braids of hair and ear piercings that Staden describes. The mingau soup has been transformed into a banquet of multiple dishes, providing the widest possible range of bodily disintegration, from a smooth thick liquid drunk from bowls to increasingly more solid and recognizable bodily components such as intestines, which the women cut, hold, and chew with much enthusiasm.62 These parts are on display on four round platters in the middle of the circle, emphasizing the communal aspect of the consumption of the human body and the differences in its digestibility. The total dissolution of the body is contrasted with the twisting, sausagelike viscera that resemble anatomical renderings of the intestines spilling out of the body. On one platter is the head, which we know from the overall narrative has boiled for a long time, together with the intestines, yet remains indigestible. The head that looks on from its low place on the ground in a state of utter despair is de Bry’s addition. The damage caused by being boiled for hours is evident, but no more so than the head’s painful awareness of now being food, and even worse of being on par with the pile of intestines on another platter. The head combines the experience of being cannibalized with the role of the witness to the cannibal ritual, thus pointing to the dangerous position that Hans Staden occupied, according to Dryander. As a substitute for Staden, the head is the witness to its own demise, the demise of its status within the idealized antique model and thus of meaning based on the privileged position of the human body and in particular the face. The head also becomes a witness to the process of ingestion and digestion as the loss of individuality when one body is incorporated into another, and is thus converted into something unknown and no longer readable in the face. The process of eating is, as always, transitional, and in this case parts of the body are already digested, while the head remains not only undigested but aware of its own fallen condition. The intestines are, of course, the part of the body in which digestion takes place, and it is worth recalling that in anatomical debates the head was given control over the digestive organs. As discussed in the previous chapter, the digestive system was B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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considered a working kitchen, one that changed everything that entered it, mixing, cooking, and converting it. The kitchen staff belonged in the lower part, especially the diaphragm, whose function was “to restrict the most unimportant part of the life-spirit to the lowest region of the central body cavity to keep it and the vapours of smells raised by the members of nutrition from interfering with the loftier operations of the senses.”63 However, vapors from food do rise to the brain, and, once there, they are either passed out via the sutures of the cranium and dissipate or are congealed by the brain’s coldness and passed through the nostrils. The head, then, was seen as a kind of chimney that functioned through the openings in the skull, joining the nose to the stomach, the top of the house to the lowly kitchen. This engraving (fig. 40) adheres to the hierarchies of the body reasserted by anatomical knowledge, yet it also troubles them. The head’s position has become low, inverting but also retaining the verticality of the anatomical body. But while the inversion of the status of the head may be informed by ethnographic evidence of Tupinamba concerns about the indigestibility of the head, the reappearance of the head is a particular concern of de Bry’s images, which, having taken up the model of antique sculpture, could not entirely ignore it. Children run around holding severed heads by the hair, revealing through the face their proximity to life; in one instance, a boy shuts the eyes of a head after it sees its own death. In the panel on cannibalism in Jan van Kessel’s 1666 Continent of America, a head that has just been severed is grabbed by two boys who lower it not only physically but also by combining it with effigies and toys.64 Yet the head is also at the center of the image, still spilling blood and still situated in the ineffable time between life and death (Fig. 39). The quick death, so admired by the European witness, is replaced with the implied self-awareness of the individual subject. The problems raised by the indigestible head may be mitigated, at least in part, by bringing it into the preparations of the body for cooking, for it is through this elaborate process that it is to be restrained. Léry praises the expertise and efficiency of the work: the quick kill with just one stroke, the skill of a butcher in cutting up the body, and even the cannibal’s appropriation of European weapons in order to become a better cannibal. In the world of natural law of the cannibal, the male warrior counts on both his fierceness and his efficiency to embody valor and virtue. The women perform equally intensive labor, but their goal is to support the community’s well-being, and thus they, like Eve, prepare the nourishment. The head persists in spite of all attempts to convert one kind of matter into another, for, as the most privileged site of meaning, it cannot be abandoned or submerged in the pot. Even so, with the body of the cannibal being a mixture of antique sculpture and ethnographic details, the decapitated head becomes the remnant of a fallen sculpture, in effect the fragmentation of the antique body. Every attempt to read the head as being at the center of the narrative fails. Instead of reclining on its side, the head on the platter in figure 40 is upright and looks around, not managing 112

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to approximate a familiar narrative of decapitation, such as that of the martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist. Nor does this severed head resemble the skulls frequently shown in images of cannibalism, hung high at entry points of Tupinamba villages, a practice that Léry declared to be more a European expectation than an Indigenous practice. This concept of the decapitated head of cannibalism, often shown on the ground with an arrow through the forehead, is an attribute of the personification of America in Cesare Ripa’s 1593 Iconologia and was used frequently in European geographical atlases.65 The heads in de Bry’s cannibal narrative cannot be easily digested. They encourage our desire for meaning, whether as the victim of violent fragmentation or of cannibalism, but they also force us to think in new ways because they cannot be situated in a clear divide between victor and victim. This is not to say that the dominance of the idealized sculptural body can be erased, but even so the persistence of the past prompts something new to emerge. While the eating of flesh moves rather easily from New World cannibal to Old World Catholic and back again, the head, as primarily bone, interrupts the exchange, not as the remnant of the living body after death, as in the case of the relic, but as that which requires the hard work of chewing, swallowing, and digesting. Even in the case of the roasting limbs, the cannibal fragment shows itself to be a crosscut of the body rather than a layer that can be easily removed. The flesh of the cannibal fragment usually reveals the cut of the bone, suggesting the arduousness of the work of both eating and digesting. This kind of cut does not allow the body to become whole again, either as a relic or within the parameters of new medical research, which proposed whole bones as the structure of the body and the requirement of the articulated skeleton.

Bones in Transit In the early modern worldwide movement of human remains, the voice that emerges most forcefully is that of the cannibal. Journeys between Europe, Asia, and the Americas were diverse in purpose, yet they shared a focus on the human body in relation to other cultures and new forms of knowledge. The introduction of Christian relics to the New World produced in some cases cross-cultural exchanges based on human bone—for example, exchanges between the ancestor bone rituals of the Tupinamba and the skull relics brought by Jesuit missionaries to Brazil. Transported bone relics were also collected in Europe and displayed in cabinets with other kinds of bone objects, a proximity that often altered their status from miracle-working objects to ones that demonstrated nature’s wonders or anatomical and ethnographic knowledge.66 Bones displayed in anatomy cabinets were confused with relics, which, owing to their association with the violence of missionary experience, were in turn allied with cannibal practices of the New World. Travel itself shifted the identity of human remains, as the opportunities opened up for trade and the exploitation of B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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human and natural resources were never entirely separate from the acquisition of ethnographic and anatomical knowledge. In a well-known instance, in 1619 Otto Heurius, a professor of medicine at the University of Leiden, urged university authorities to request from the East and West India Companies the procurement of bones of “strange” people with the goal of displaying these in Leiden’s anatomical theater.67 Given the proliferation of skeletons as anatomical displays, it is not surprising that skulls were mentioned as especially desirable for having both ornamental and didactic purposes. The return to Rome of human remains from Jesuit missions in order to acquire official verification of martyr status was entangled from the start with new forms of knowledge of the body.68 Francis Xavier was the first Jesuit missionary to travel to Asia, and although he did not die a martyr, the return of his body was turned into a kind of martyrdom that became a model for future missionaries. After his death in 1552 on Shangchuan Island, off the southern coast of China, his body was transported to Goa. The journey took a number of years, and, according to accounts, increasingly large crowds accosted his body at each port, cutting into it to verify rumors of his sanctity. There are multiple versions of the story of a woman who “audaciously but devoutly took off one of his toes” or “had desired to have a relic, lowered herself to a foot, and instead of a kiss gave him a bite”; all of them end affirming that she could not hide her assault thanks to the fresh blood that immediately started to flow. Commentators drew on the immediacy of the flesh-eating cannibal to argue for the uncorrupted state of the sacred body. When Xavier’s remains finally arrived in Goa, the crowds are said to have included skeptics who claimed the body had been embalmed and thus artificially maintained.69 The Portuguese viceroy ordered Cosmas Saraina, a celebrated physician, to inspect the cadaver, an incident that witnesses compared to a public anatomy lesson. In keeping with that practice, the surgeon was said to have first cut into the stomach and, when fresh blood emerged, to have inserted his finger into the part of the body most susceptible to deterioration, namely, the bowels, only to find them unaffected by time and free of artificial preservatives. The violence of anatomy and the violence of the cannibal now overlapped: “so great was the opinion of Xaverius sanctity, that . . . all the care and vigilance the Fathers could use to look unto it, did hardly hinder the violence of the devout people.”70 Francis Xavier performed the pain of martyrdom not as he moved toward death but, like the cadaver in an anatomical dissection, as he returned from death to life through the production of knowledge. Xavier’s cadaver went on to be subjected to officially sanctioned dismemberment. After the Jesuits in Goa refused to allow the body of the future saint to continue on to Rome, the Jesuit superior-general Claudio Acquaviva ordered the corpse’s lower right arm to be removed and sent to Rome as a substitute. Not surprisingly, this incident, repeatedly criticized as cannibalistic even by Jesuits, was almost never depicted. The only known exception is in the Convento Máximo de 114

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Figure 41. Unknown, The Removal of Saint Francis Xavier’s Arm, eighteenth century. Fresco. Convento Máximo de la Merced, Quito, Ecuador. Project on the Engraved Sources of Spanish Colonial Art 1500B.

la Merced in Quito, and thus outside the scrutiny of Rome, where a fresco cycle of the life of Francis produced in the eighteenth century includes the amputation of the arm (fig. 41).71 As I have written elsewhere, the severing of the arm is pictured as both martyrdom and anatomical dissection.72 The Jesuit is shown lying on a bedlike shrine, within a glass cabinet with a door that allows access to the body. Of the five participating Jesuits, two carry candlelike torches, indicating that the act was illicit and, according to a local sermon, took place in the middle of the night in a secret part of the church.73 As the subject of an anatomy demonstration, Francis maintains an uneasy presence, beyond physical sensation and distanced from the observer. But Francis was also enacting the role of the martyr, and thus he initially resisted having his arm amputated and experienced pain, according to the inscription. One participant holds a written document that refers to ­Acquaviva’s order but also doubles as an anatomical image specifying the exact section of the arm to be removed. The surgeon’s assistant holds the cloth that has become drenched in blood and provides evidence of the suffering endured by the martyr. The presence of pain permeates the image, just as it does the severed arm, which, after reaching Rome in 1614, was put on display inside a framed reliquary in the chapel of Saint Francis Xavier in the flagship Jesuit church of Il Gesù, becoming an indexical sign of baptism in Asia.74 In time, the sealed relic started B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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to decompose, and the flesh turned into a martyr’s bone relic by revealing the process of its own disintegration. The Jesuits continued to transport human remains from their missions in the Americas and Asia, though usually after they had been stripped of all bodily flesh, so as to preserve the bones that were to become relics. Like bones used for anatomical display, these remains were boiled—or sometimes buried, temporarily covered in calcium. Accounts also indicate that the bones were kept in makeshift containers at ports along the route, where they waited months, or even years, for available ships.75 The retreat from failed missions always included the urgent collection of potential martyr remains. When missionaries were expelled from Japan in 1616, the accumulation of crates of bones in ports on the various routes to Rome increased exponentially, and the paperwork recording their identity was misplaced or lost. Francesco Bressani’s 1657 engraved map of New France, produced in Paris to raise funds for the lost Jesuit missions in Huron lands, traces this loss through the first half of the seventeenth century.76 In the lower right corner of the map, a large inset depicts the attack of the last mission by the Iroquois, staged as a scene of martyrdom (fig. 42).77 Two Jesuits, tied to stakes that bear their names (Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant), are being tortured by the Iroquois. The tools used in the procedure—hatchets, knives, metal collars, a large cauldron of boiling water—are organized for close observation as the Iroquois start the elaborate process of dissecting and removing flesh. The hatchet is used to cut the flesh of Brebeuf, the Jesuit on the right; around his neck is a metal collar with attached rectangular pieces of iron, which, as hot water is poured over it, detaches flesh from bone. Lalemant too is scalded with boiling water and will soon have his skin removed. Meanwhile, knives and other instruments are being heated for the work to come. The process of removing flesh from bone is here shown to be not only about the suffering of the martyr but also, as in anatomy, about the meticulous work necessary to dismantle the body. The would-be martyrs may retain their traditional acceptance of horrific pain, evoking the kind of courage in death that Montaigne ascribed to the cannibal, but it is the cannibal who has become necessary to produce the relic, while Christian martyrdom has worked to produce the savagery of the cannibal. Jean de Léry writes that it was only when Europeans gave the Tupinamba tools that they became proper cannibals: “since the arrival of Christians in that region, the savages have been using the knives and other iron tools they have received from them to cut up the bodies of their prisoners”—and, one might add, to become the makers of martyrs.78 According to Peter Hulme, in the eighteenth century, residual bones are archetypal in cannibal tales.79 Whether in traveler accounts or fictional narratives such as Tarzan or Robinson Crusoe, the European invariably stumbles upon the aftermath of cannibalism, a deserted scene strewn with bones, a cooking pot, and discarded utensils. In the seventeenth century, however, it was the body’s transformation from flesh to bone that conjoined the conflictual exchanges of the present with the possibilities of the future. In forging this link, the digestion of flesh is necessary to produce physi116

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Figure 42. Francesco Bressani, “Nuova Francia acurata delineatio” (1657), detail. Engraving. Canadian National Archive, Ottawa. Figure 43. Skulls and other bones from the seventeenth century. Musée et conservatoire d’anatomie, Montpellier, France. Photo by author.

cal immediacy and experience, while bone becomes the conduit of time, complicating the relation between the permanence and malleability of bone itself. The vocabulary of cannibalism entered anatomy (and martyrdom) through new forms of travel across vast distances. It required the separation of time and space to remove the human body from its stable place in relation to a particular human agent and transform it into a material that could cross cultural and religious boundaries. Travel accounts that record the shipment of missionary bones from Goa and Manila describe the already disintegrated state of human remains that no longer could be identified through reliable evidence. Of the hundreds of human remains that arrived in Rome during the course of the seventeenth century seeking official recognition, only three retained enough evidence to be granted the status of martyr.80 The relocation of bones in cabinets of curiosities, private cabinets of relics, and collections of B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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Figure 44. Children boiling a skull, from Hans Staden, True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (1557), 54. Woodcut. Wikimedia Commons / Dornicke.

anatomical and ethnographic preparations altered their potential for martyrdom and in some cases transformed their significance (fig. 43).81 Some bones were put on display in Athanasius Kircher’s cabinet of curiosities in the Jesuit Collegio Romano, where they were probably catalogued as of both religious and ethnographic interest. The only extant image of the cabinet shows small containers on the lower shelves that are consistent with the containers of bones from Asia mentioned in the 1742 inventory of the collection. For the most part, these and other bones shipped to Rome have continued to exist in an uncertain state, forgotten, invisible, and increasingly silent. There are many still kept in dark cabinets along the aisles of the church of Il Gesù in Rome, presented almost as relics in waiting. And many have been inserted into altarpieces, in which the same kind of bone is used as a decorative border or device, repeated in countless numbers and forming a new collective body that disregards the identity of individual martyrs and evokes instead the collective cannibal body.82

The Skull in the New World In Vesalius’s treatise, the skull proves to be the most problematic set of bones, especially if the view has the potential to be confused with a face and produce empathy on the part of the viewer. It is only in the unruly space opened up by the illustrated letters in the treatise that one meets the skull’s gaze as it is being thrown into a large pot of boiling water by the usual mischievous putti (fig. 12). This process of boiling the skull is, as already noted, part of the transformation of human bone into a new entity, the articulated mobile skeleton. The resemblance between this image and a woodcut of a human skull being boiled in a large pot in Staden’s cannibal narrative is remarkable (fig. 44). In both images, the large pot boils over kindling that emits 118

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v­ igorous flames, and the skull conveys a grimacing look, as if aware of the horror of being submerged in boiling water. Even more suggestive is how Vesalius’s description of preparing bones by boiling calls up the everyday activity of making soup, and provides a double for the scene of the Tupinamba women making mingau by boiling the human head and intestines in a large pot. The spectacle is all the more shocking for being instigated by playful children gathered around the cauldron. Staden explains that children are the ones who eat the little flesh found in the head.83 In another image (fig. 39), children and their mothers put the head into the caldron, but mixed with the innards of the body, bringing together the extreme points of interiority. The head, where the contradictions between flesh and bone meet, seems always in the process of transition. Both skulls require transformation, one to reveal the potential of artificial life within the body itself, the other to acknowledge that the indigestible is always within the body. The hold that the skull retains in European culture—the excessive value of the individual as subject—is also about the unfathomable link between life and death. As Esther Cohen has argued, to sever the head from the rest of the body was considered to be the most extreme form of death, as it was thought to separate the soul from the body and bring about the total annihilation of the person.84 Yet the head is also where life and death frequently meet, in images of heads that leak flesh and blood and of faces that seem aware of their own death, as well as in skulls that retain the memory of such violence. According to Léry, the Tupinamba saved the skulls of those they killed and piled them up to show foreigners, not because it was their own custom but because they knew it would instill fear of cannibalism: “when the French visit that is what they show, these fleshless skulls as trophies.” Indeed, Léry criticizes the propensity of European maps to depict human skulls at entry points of Tupinamba villages.85 Martel suggests that fear of cannibals was closely linked to Christian identity at a time of religious turmoil, and that the Tupinamba exploited the European fixation on cannibalism and used rumors and mocking in their exchanges with Europeans.86 In effect, purposeful miscommunication and performing to expectations of others were as much part of cross-cultural exchange as Staden’s attempts to perform different identities. The Tupinamba were, of course, not the only ones to use anxieties about cannibalism for their own ends. As de Bry’s publications show, European Protestants evoked the resemblance between cannibalism and the cult of relics to critique the beliefs and actions of their Catholic rivals in the New World, in particular the Portuguese and the Spanish. The introduction of relics in the New World brought into tension the traditional journey of the relic and new forms of travel. The sacred status of the relic required its separation from the everyday world, but its success depended on its ability to be integrated into a new context.87 A persistent strategy was to provide a rupture in the life of the relic by putting it at the center of a dangerous journey. The early Christian dispersion of bodily fragments of saints from the Holy Land to Europe was frequently B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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conceptualized through a type of literary genre known as “translation,” which recounted the circumstances of the theft of the relic and its removal to a new setting.88 Yet in the geopolitics of the New World, the relic, instead of being transported, however illicitly, from a distant place to one that welcomed and celebrated its presence, was expected to leave its accepted place in order to undertake evangelical work in a location where it had little or no ability to speak. Scholars of Spanish and Portuguese America agree that while religious objects were first transported to the New World in the assumption that Christianity would fill a religious void, missionaries quickly adjusted as they acquired knowledge about local cultural and religious practices.89 Leandro Karnal argues that distinctions of materiality became crucial in the attempt by missionaries to conduct effective exchanges in the New World. He points out that most of the relics taken to Mexico were contact relics, while those taken to Brazil were mostly bone relics, including the knee bone of Saint Sebastian, the leg bone of Saint Bras, part of the collarbone of Saint Christopher, and at least eight heads of Saint Ursula’s eleven thousand virgins.90 Bone as shared matter, and in its relationship to the body, proved crucial in forging links between the Jesuit missionaries and various Indigenous communities around the Rio de la Plata basin. There are still debates in anthropology as to whether the Tupinamba or their neighbors, the Tupiniquim, incorporated human bone in their ritual practices, just as there are still debates as to whether they actually maintained cannibalistic rituals. The two questions, however, as Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile has shown, are not unrelated. She argues that in Europe, news of cannibalism tended to overwhelm other accounts of human bones in this part of the world, but that the two practices were interconnected. Luiz Figueira, a member of one of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, mentions in a letter to Jesuit headquarters in Rome that the Tapuia people thought it was disrespectful to bury their dead in the ground and that for this reason they ate them, including the bone, which they ground to a powder. Figueira also contrasts these practices to those of the neighboring Tupinamba, who were said to eat flesh but kept bones of ancestors and enemies on the ground in tall mounds. Castelnau-L’Estoile has written on the contentious disappearance of the bodily remains of the Jesuit missionary Francisco Pinto, who died while visiting an Indigenous community north of the mission, and argues that his remains were ultimately incorporated into Tupinamba bone rituals.91 The incident was reported to Rome in the form of the traditional narrative of the stolen relic, but the account expressed uncertainty as to whether the Tupinamba took the bones because they were becoming converted to Christianity or because Pinto himself had become part of the Tupinamba rituals of the shaman as interpreter of the afterlife through the acquisition of human bone. Even more alarming to those in Rome was that Pinto’s own activities—moving from one site to another and shifting from one loyalty to another—would make it impossible to produce relics that could sustain an exclusive Christian identity. According to Castelnau-L’Estoile, Francisco Pinto’s 120

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bones, which were never located but were surrounded by rumors that they had been found, could function simultaneously within two belief systems. Even more suggestive is how human bone functioned in the cultural exchanges that followed the late sixteenth-century transportation by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries of the skull relics of the eleven thousand virgins of Saint Ursula. Long before these relics were taken from Europe to Brazil, the virgins had already infiltrated the New World. Christopher Columbus was only the first to name a grouping of unknown coastal islands after the eleven thousand virgins who, according to legend, accompanied Saint Ursula on a pilgrimage to Rome and were killed en route in Cologne. In the New World, they gave their imprecise name, in some cases only briefly, to the Virgin Islands in Antilles, the southern point of the continent later to be known as Cabo de Hornos, and the northern coastal islands eventually renamed Saint Pierre and Miquelon.92 For Columbus, it may have been the large but unknown number of islands that suggested the name, while for Ferdinand Magellan, it may have been the notion of a dangerous coastline at the southern tip of the unknown continent,93 but all shared one idea, the uncertainty of number, kind, and identity. The discovery in 1106 of a hoard of bones in Cologne’s city walls had led to the identification of the burial ground of Ursula and her companions.94 Scholars agree that this was probably a Roman graveyard, but the incident catapulted the small devotion of the virgins in the area of Cologne to a large Europe-wide cult. Reports on the relics of the virgins always stress their numbers, with many European locations vying to increase their holdings numerically.95 Dom Joao de Borja, the son of Francisco Borgia, the second general of the Society of Jesus, gathered an enormous collection of relics that included 108 bone relics of the virgins, among them eighteen heads, many arms and other body parts, and numerous unidentifiable pieces.96 During the years that Borgia served as general, the Portuguese colleges both in Europe and in the missions were equipped with a considerable number of skulls of the eleven thousand virgins. The journey from Portugal to Brazil was used by the Jesuits to address questions of credibility increasingly confronting the relics.97 An incident in which relics were destroyed while being transported from Lisbon to Brazil proved important to the promotion of the relics of the virgins.98 According to Jesuit sources, on July 14, 1570, a Portuguese ship bound for Brazil carrying Father Ignatius de Azevedo and thirty-nine companions, with supplies from Rome for one of the missions, was attacked by a Protestant ship from Navarre. The numerous accounts, produced as part of an attempt to argue for the sacred status of martyrs in the New World, tell of a fierce attack that ended with the Jesuits and their belongings being thrown into the ocean. All accounts insist that Father Azevedo had worked hard in the late 1560s to acquire a number of miracle-working images to take to Brazil, including the first licensed copy of the image of the Virgin kept in Santa Maria Maggiore, which was believed to be painted by the hand of Saint Luke and to be the authentic carrier of the presence of the Virgin.99 B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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While Azevedo acquired many relics for transportation to Brazil, it was the head of one of Ursula’s virgins that generated the most attention.100 When Antonio Cabral published all the documents used to argue the case for martyrdom in 1743, he included a sixteenth-century account of how the ship was attacked by Huguenots, who, in addition to killing all forty Jesuits and destroying the miraculous image of the Virgin, mocked the skull of Ursula’s virgin: “They found among the others a box with this inscription: ‘Head of one of the Companions of St. Ursula donated by Pope Pius V.’ This discovery put into great furor the entire brigade, and each studied how he could transform the venerable skull into the most licentious games. First they threw it with their hands like a ball. Then with their feet they rolled it all over the ship: And finally they hung it to a mast, and for days it was the subject of a thousand indignant antics. Having vented, they ended the day by throwing overboard what they found of the sacred and devotional.”101 The skull, through its inversion from sacred to mundane and back again, spoke loudly, resonating against the cannibal and its ability to cross boundaries. In Cabral’s report, the Huguenot attack on the relic becomes more shocking when the skull finally managed miraculously to return to the Old World, where it is said to be used as a ball for games in a French Protestant town; this becomes a close parallel to how the report on Tupinamba practices of cannibalism gains resonance when Montaigne associates it with the atrocities committed by Catholics against Huguenots during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.102 The mocking of religious objects, and specifically of the skull of one of Ursula’s companions, is avenged by the survival of the image of the Virgin carried by Azevedo, which manages against all odds to reach Brazil.103 Moreover, the loss of the skull is compensated by a heightened desire to have others like it. Jesuit annual reports sent back to Rome began insisting that other virgin skulls be sent to replace those lost at sea or in other kinds of attacks, just as the loss of the martyrs became a call for other Jesuits to follow and repeat the same missionary journey. Two such skulls arrived in Brazil, in 1575 and 1577. In 1583, Father Christovao de Gouveia, charged with bringing a relic of the Holy Cross to the college in Salvador of Bahia, also managed to acquire another virgin skull.104 The skulls became interchangeable and stood for each loss as well as for the Jesuit martyrs themselves. For the Jesuits, the attempt to revitalize the cult of Saint Ursula and her companions was closely related to their worldwide missionary activities.105 Indeed, the legend of the virgins, with its extensive travels and violent collective deaths, offered the Jesuits an endless supply of relics as well as the opportunity to situate them within the expanding geography of their mission. The companions of Saint Ursula were well known for being unknown, for being impossible to count and impossible to tell apart. In the early fifteenth-century St. Albans Chronicle, the women are shown arriving back in Cologne after their journey on the Rhine, there to encounter the invading Huns (plate 9).106 The young women bear a physiognomic similarity that 122

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binds them together and seems to deny their demise and dispersion. Their martyrdom is reduced to one form of execution, namely, decapitation. The virgins are beheaded one by one as they compliantly walk down the plank to their death. The change is sudden and radical, dividing not only life from death but also body from relic. Interestingly, it is the severed head that has already been drained of color, and, resting upright on the virgin’s ultramarine robe, it is in the process of becoming a relic, while the rest of the body lies horizontally and retains the colors and gestures of the living. As in most Christian narratives, death does not stop change; rather, it continues it through the powers of the relic. For the missionaries in the New World, it was imperative to claim, at least to the officials in Rome, that relics worked to advance the goal of Christian conversion. For example, a 1592 request for more virgin skulls claims that “they have much excited the devotion of the inhabitants of Brazil and have thus made much progress with their souls.”107 But in trying to argue for such successes, the reports often reveal the loss or rejection of the relics, as well as the unorthodox ways in which they were used in the missions. In official settings, for instance, in the College of Bahia, processions and theater performances were organized honoring the virgins as patron saints, as on the occasion of the arrival of three heads in 1584.108 Judging from the reports to Rome, this event seems to have followed the usual course of Jesuit performances, including the reenactment of the dream of Saint Ursula in which an angel appeared and told her to undertake a pilgrimage to Rome. Karnal argues that the Jesuits combined the practices of Catholic processions with local rituals, drawing on Indigenous musical practices and introducing the kind of European instruments— flutes, sitars, and string instruments—that could be integrated into the local dances and performances. Relics were introduced into these performances and intermixed with the bones used by the Tupinamba themselves. In one procession in a village near Bahia celebrating the invention of the cross, the locals constructed a cross of bones: “the Indians did dance and sang around it in their own manner, and from time to time they would bow to the cross held by one priest.” This Jesuit account goes on to explain that otherwise it was like one of the Tupinamba’s welcome feasts, and that although they were unable to understand the chanting, they were willing to introduce something new into these events, but only “from time to time.”109 Indecipherable sounds and gestures made the greatest impression. In his account of the Tupinamba, Jean de Léry, who as a Calvinist was committed to the written word, reveals that what still haunted him, years after his return to Europe, was the chanting that accompanied Tupinamba bone rituals, which he could not understand but very much desired to try to remember and record.110 There is evidence to suggest that these encounters produced considerable contestation. Yet the Jesuit strategy of slow infiltration and integration of diverse cultural practices suggests the emergence of something new, something that could not be revealed to the officials in Rome. As Caroline Walker Bynum has suggested, the B o n e s i n T r a n s i t, F l e s h i n S h r e d s

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materiality of relics, combined with practices, tended to produce transformation and reassemblage.111 This is also suggested by an unusual incident in which the skull of one of the eleven thousand virgins was reconstituted in relation to its materiality. In July 1576, one of the Jesuits in Bahia named Father Tolosa received permission to take one of the skulls on his travel by ship along the coastline to Pernambouc in order to show it to a local community.112 As the ship came ashore, a fire broke out onboard, and all disembarked, leaving everything behind. When it was found that the box containing the relic remained undamaged, it was declared a miracle. This miracle was then associated with the salvaged load of refined sugar that the ship was carrying, and the bone and sugar were said to be linked and even to resemble each other. Not only was the production of sugar in the territory associated with divine approval, but the relic itself was regarded as transferring its powers through resemblance and proximity. But why the insistence in the New World on the defleshed skull? When the skull relics were displayed in Jesuit colleges, as in Bahia, where the virgins had become official patronesses, they were fitted with a support of gilded silver, paid for by the Portuguese congregation, as reported in a letter to Rome in 1603. When taken out in procession and used in ceremonies in the villages, no such covering was used.113 The relics were not just exposed as human bone but were introduced into local rituals precisely because they were made of human bone. By contrast, the many relics of Ursula’s virgins taken to Goa and other parts of Asia were interspersed with other body parts, and with relics from other personages in the legend, including the male counterparts.114 In Europe, the relics of Ursula’s virgins became known as much for the head reliquaries through which they were circulated as for the relic itself (plate 10). Scott Montgomery writes that the cult of the virgins was about “fleshing out bones” found in Cologne, whether through textual accounts or the development of head reliquaries.115 The Cologne reliquaries animate the body by encasing it in flesh, hair, and costume, and the liveliness of the faces suggests the animation of the relics themselves. The head reliquaries, moreover, deemphasize the idea of decapitation and include the upper part of the chest and full neck. Some have compartments that open up on the head where a skull was kept, while others also often include other parts of the body and even parts of other bodies. In the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, the virgins’ skulls were taken out in procession and used in ceremonies in villages that lacked reliquaries; even in churches they were installed in relatively simple transparent boxes. The boxes permitted the shape of the skull and the cut at the neck to be within full view (plate 11). In the case of skulls, the desire to empathize with the face is still there, but this is a face in another world, a world as different as the New or the Old. With the use of the naked skull for the virgins, the eleven thousand relics become indistinguishable from one another. On the one hand, the consistent use of the skull brought homogeneity to the group 124

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and retained its anonymity. On the other hand, the skull raised questions about the ultimate opaqueness of the materiality of bone. Instead of fleshing out the body by locating it within an individual or collective body, the skulls are about a body already defleshed and emptied of interiority. The skull continues to signify an individual, but one that is absent, as all specificity is removed. The skull as a sign of decapitation brings with it the ultimate form of anonymity, in the sense of earthly identity and in the sense of the unknowingness of death. But the defleshed skulls of the virgins also maintained an unexpected mobility, changing places within established hierarchies and even entering into other cultural practices around bone. The image of decapitation raises the question of the voice, as the cut stops not only the breath but also the ability to emit sound.116 The silencing of the voice brings to the skull the poignancy of being exiled from its given voice but, for this very reason, its ability to accommodate other voices. In effect, the skulls of the virgins, because of their movement from the sacred to the mundane and back again, had an unusual range of voices within the possibilities given to relics. Within Old World religious conflicts, the skulls were repeatedly used to mock bodily relics, and their sacredness was inverted and thus turned into the superstitious, the blasphemous, and the profane. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Brazil, other virgin skulls spoke in much more inscrutable ways, as they were made to be translators of the Tupinamba, yet were uncertain about what might be being said in relation to Indigenous rituals of the dead, the production of sugar, or Christian ideas of salvation. Perhaps the most radical way in which the virgins’ skulls were altered was by being displayed next to other bones, whether of Tupinamba ancestors or of cannibal remains. This proximity transformed the skulls into something other than the standard Christian skull reliquaries of Cologne. There is now an important distinction between the skull relics of the “New” and “Old” Worlds, as the former offers gaps that can be reconstituted in different ways by different participants. It is by tracing these circuits of conflicting and contradictory uses that these objects reveal a potential to forge new exchanges and even a new kind of language. The very otherness of the skull, with its inability to breach differences between the living and the dead, points to gaps that need to be filled in the process of encounter. The sacred may be vulnerable when it comes into contact with a different set of beliefs, but the focus on materiality—human bone—opened up the possibility of mixtures, or better yet of moments in which recognition of shared experience may emerge.

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Chapter 4

Between Face and Brain Recalibrating the Head

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onfronted with Gaetano Giulio Zumbo’s wax model of a dissected head, the violence of anatomy and the suffering endured to produce anatomical knowledge is difficult to ignore (plate 12). The severing of the head is most often imagined through the punishment of decapitation, long regarded as the most definitive form of death, one that separates the soul from the body and erases the specificity of the person.1 Yet this beheading has not been achieved by a decisive single cut. Instead, the separation is uneven, with nerves, muscles, and part of the throat protruding as if retained in order to examine the conduits that connected the head with the rest of the body (plate 13). In anatomical practice, the head was often removed because it was known to take more time to decompose once detached from the rest of the body.2 The tools of the anatomist that have severed the head have also been used to cut and pull back the scalp, starting from the upper part of the forehead. The underlying flesh has been scraped, and the removal of soft tissue has started to reveal the skull. A decisive diagonal cut across the face divides it in two, from the top of the forehead to the neck, curving carefully around the eye, nose, and mouth. Through this surgical procedure, the head is opened for close observation, first as a landscape of living flesh, one that dips and rises, is interrupted with crevices and ridges, and brings visibility to rich layers of flesh, fat, and ligaments. But this strategic cut that opens the surface to what lies beneath also safeguards the coherence of the face. It is through the cut itself that key features of the face are retained, enabling it to dominate in spite of other ways in which sight and touch are activated. The model juxtaposes smooth skin and raw flesh, the first anticipating the softness and moistness of living skin, the second mimicking the sticky ooze of decomposing flesh. A third level of observation is opened up by the tools of anatomy. On the side of the face, the exposed facial nerves and salivary glands activate the kind of touch that seeks to gauge their shape, depth, and texture, and produce classifiable knowledge. In Zumbo’s wax model, the anatomical dismantling of the head is not simply about revealing what is hidden but also about the activation of perception through the senses and the multiple forms of interiority held within the head. There are changes to the head that cannot be attributed directly to the intervention of surgical instruments. The color of skin and flesh has a grayish tone, and the soft tissue exposed by the removal of the skin appears to be disintegrating. Blood and other fluids now leak from the nostrils and the mouth, indicating the natural process of mutation that speeds up after death. In contrast, the hair on the chin, the upper lip, and the eyebrows seems dry and somewhat brittle, perhaps because it is actual human hair and has undergone more rapid deterioration than the wax. Materiality itself does not arrest the body’s mutability. The teeth appear resistant to change, but they press against the open mouth in what seems a belated struggle for breath. This face, its eyelids fighting a losing battle to remain open, attempts to fend off the coming of the dark, but nothing, neither the uneven state of its matter nor the effects of brutal defacement, diminishes the sense of a living presence. 127

The early modern wax anatomical model is usually considered to be first and foremost a duplicate of the human body.3 A disturbing sense of presence is frequently achieved in the meticulous simulation of human matter with wax. In the case of Zumbo’s head, the first known full-size wax model, the relationship between model and human body is confounding, especially because it activates resemblance that transcends physical appearance.4 Produced around 1690 and kept at the early cabinet of wax modeling known as La Specola, it became, like other of Zumbo’s works, an uneasy constituent of the Museum of Zoology and Natural History in Florence. The wax head is the product of experimentation with both wax techniques and human matter and addresses the body’s instability as much as it seeks to counter it.5 Zumbo’s model offers an unflinching approach to the simulation of the specific steps taken to dissect the head and of the techniques of wax modeling used to duplicate those steps. The model maintains the anatomical image’s requisite combination of “lifelikeness” and physical violence, but these components now intersect in a much more combative way, each attentive to the implications of the connection. The observer’s proximity to the model, both psychologically and physically, now becomes the basis of the knowledge produced by the model. Proximity enables the attentive observer to assess the workings of glands, muscles, and nerves, but it also increases the discomfort of coming into contact with prolonged pain, agonizing despair, and even a glimpse of one’s own death. Zumbo’s wax model is unprecedented in distinguishing between the time of death and the time of dissection, thus acknowledging the difference between the body’s natural mutation and the external imposition of bodily destruction. Temporality becomes complicated, with time stretched out and sped up as the various signs of destruction and corruption interconnect and separate. While the face suggests that life is still present, the decomposition of its surfaces and the opening of fissures and fractures already conjure up the shape of the skull. Recognition of the underlying skull does not diminish the effect of confronting eyes that seem to look back; rather, it makes the encounter that much more charged. The face is the first but by no means the only encounter with human materials offered by Zumbo’s wax model. This model is, of course, not simply a face but a head, and from the time it entered the collection of the Medici around 1700, it has been kept in a small glass cabinet.6 Multiple and varied views are opened up by this mode of display, and the view from the back reveals not only that the skin and flesh have been peeled back to make the cranium entirely visible, but also that the cranium has been cut at the top to allow the observation of its internal components (plate 14). The cranium itself is not a wax simulation but an actual human bone cranium, and the cut has been made by a rounded saw, a dedicated anatomical instrument. In the anatomical study of the head, the cut of the neck was superseded by the sawing of the top of the cranium, an opening conceived as accessing the workings of the mind and holding the potential for the surgical intervention into the person as a whole. This 128

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kind of cut, already used in images that attempt to reach the interior of the human being, became the distinctive cut of anatomy as intervention rather than as observation, and it introduced specialized tools and imagery that initiated the deployment of psychological forms of violence. With the top part of the cranium removed, one has access to a full internal view of the container, which still holds part of the brain, while another part has been removed and is on display next to the head. The brain is divided into bulbous, softcolored sculptural segments, while the part of the cranium that has been emptied reveals a complex system of passageways that distribute fluids between bone, muscle, and brain matter. An entirely different system is now shown to be at work in the head, one that depends on circuits rather than the senses, and the concentration of the person as a face is replaced with the workings of the human body at large. That an actual human cranium was used to structure the overall head and its internal components may prove initially shocking, but this view paradoxically offers a reprieve from confrontation with the face. The abjection that accumulates with every attempt to observe the front of the head is now dispersed as an entirely new interior emerges. First, the display of the internal shape of the cranium undermines the all too familiar appearance of the skull, visible through the layers of the face and suggesting the emptiness of the head that is death. Instead, the cranium shows no perforations and is filled with a rich assemblage of sculptural components, suggesting a complex system of animation, circulation, and connectivity. From this perspective, the head reveals not the desiccated matter that is the skull but the fresh, moist materiality of the brain, which is reunited with the rest of the body and brings it to life. Zumbo’s model complicates the strategies deployed in printed anatomical images and in later wax models, so much so that it raises questions about the context in which it was produced. As a one-of-a-kind model that preceded the eighteenthcentury production of wax models, used both in cabinets of anatomy and as resources for study, its function in advancing anatomical goals cannot be taken for granted. By the 1690s, medical research and training sought the use of substitutes, especially through the preservation of the body, in order to avoid the problems presented by actual human bodies.7 Zumbo’s meticulous work with colored wax does seem to have taken the crucial step of transforming the human preparation into a more permanent wax model. Subsequent wax models claimed not only the accuracy of the replication and its permanence, but also the illusionism achieved through wax’s resemblance to the surface of the human body. Zumbo’s wax head emerges not as matter that has been turned into human form but as a “once living creature whose life has been interrupted.”8 Kenneth Gross, writing on the early modern concept of the moving statue, suggests that sculpture was animated not only as inert matter turned into living being through artistic creativity, in the tradition of Pygmalion and Galatea, but as the living body emptied of life turned into inanimate matter. Gross calls this entity “the relic of a B e t w e e n Fa c e a n d B r a i n

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metamorphosis,” in which the body is emptied of life but holds the potential to generate a sense of presence and in the process to survive its own dismemberment. He argues that the deployment of the Belvedere Torso in Vesalius’s treatise holds this promise of the reinvention of the body through the negotiation between the fragile internal organs and the marble fragment that is able to survive its own decay through the organs’ spirited outward move.9 Zumbo’s head could be said to hold in place the display of emotive experience, associated with the senses and the face, within the spatial organization of its materials, one enacting its effects on the other. But, of course, this is not an entirely distinctive divide, as the emotive reveals the skull and its spatial organization, and the cranium brings forth the realization that its wall and the face are one and the same. Moreover, unlike Gross’s argument about the loss of memory in the Belvedere Torso’s reappropriation of the dissected viscera, the wax model is not detached from memory because the face carries every detail. In fact, the model reveals its own history, perhaps because its intimate connection to the living body is still the priority. The living survives, not as an arrested relic but as it moves toward its demise, never losing sight of the memory of violence, pain, and prolonged suffering. Zumbo’s model addresses not only the possibility of merging wax model and human being but also the persistent problem of matching visual form to the ephemerality of the body. If the face was too familiar and overloaded with a hierarchical concept of meaning, the brain remained suspended in abstract theories of separate cells with little relation to physical matter. The model provides a place for their encounter, contributing to important anatomical issues but especially to materiality and its processes of making and unmaking, without detaching it from the rest of the body or the world, which is to say, the person in question. The remaking of the body into something like it but different becomes an exploration of the relationships between nature, technology, and the person. In the process, the model intervenes in important medical debates about the head, especially debates that involve the visualization of the body. The wax model is pivotal in visualizing the ongoing transition of the head from skull to cranium. It also offers an intriguing example of the emergence of the cross section of the head as a new way to image the brain. Invariably, these interventions are relational as well as visual, stressing the confrontation of the face and brain, the potential of picturing the head in three-dimensional sculptural form rather than flat, cartographic cross section, and the intersection between mimetic mutation and abstract mechanized animation. Zumbo’s wax head is not just located at a moment of change in the duplication of the human body; it is itself actualizing change, bringing about not only the possibility of a more durable replicate for anatomical study but also one that raises a number of concerns in which the contradictions of experience and knowledge are offered for consideration, forging links between the past and the future. This replicate, it would seem, was not simply about simulating a surface resemblance but about bringing into view a confrontation between the transient embodied state and 130

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the assemblage of materiality, and doing it by being attentive to the mechanics of its production. Diverse instruments were needed to pursue these contradictory goals. Anatomical scalpels and knives have apparently cut, scraped, and scooped skin and flesh to uncover the various organs, muscles, and bone. But these are visible only because the tools of the wax sculptor have layered, coated, and encrusted colored wax, building the surfaces from the bone up. Within this confrontation of forming and deforming, there is also matter that seems entirely undirected. Instruments have transformed the head, but the flesh—like the wax—continues to manifest its own changes. Blood and other liquids leak from the nostrils and the mouth, and these bodily fluids mimic the effects of wax, which, applied in its most liquid state and allowed to dry at will, could not be entirely controlled. There is considerable ambiguity between the work achieved by the instruments of dissection, by the wax tools of the modeler, and by the uninhibited flow of matter. And this ambiguity is what conveys the intangible in the human experience of mutation, of being between life and death, and of seeing one’s own demise.

Making the Wax Model In early modern anatomical research, the rapid deterioration of the human body proved to be the greatest challenge and prompted the most persistent complaints about decomposing flesh, putrid smells, and the disturbing appearance of the corpse.10 Decomposition also generated experiments with “living” replicas, both to develop new research and to train medical students.11 Early experiments used wax not necessarily for its resemblance to bodily matter but for its ability to change from liquid to solid and thus intersect with the body’s own matter. The early experiments entailed injecting melted wax into actual body parts, in order to fill in all cavities and stabilize the human components.12 These experiments increasingly brought together surgeons and wax makers, but they proved unsatisfactory in arresting the mutation of human matter, especially the deterioration of texture and color. A revealing description of one such experiment is included in a letter of July 1706, which accuses Zumbo of absconding to France with a secret wax formula invented by Guillaume Desnoues, a French surgeon at a hospital in Genoa who for a time formed a partnership with the wax modeler.13 The letter, part of a correspondence between Desnoues and the scientist Domenico Guglielmini published in 1706 and 1707, reveals that the partners attempted to devise and manufacture natural anatomical preparations to be used in the public anatomy lessons given by Desnoues in the hospital. In this context, the letter describes Desnoues’s work on the preparation of a woman who had died while giving birth:14 The true inventor brings you two bodies prepared with great industry: one is that of a dead woman, in the pains of childbirth, because of the head of the child that cannot

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come out, as it is larger than the place of origin. Mons. Desnoues represented perfectly the mother and the child in that anguished state. In this body you can see all the inner parts and the most delicate with exactitude in its secret path: thus there will no longer be a need to apply oneself to the unpleasant study of anatomy on corpses, difficult to find and horrible to investigate. The author spared Giovanni [hospital] surgeons a penalty, of which he did not spare himself: Having long worked in the large Hospital of Genoa, and having profited by the practice of having corpses at his disposal, he was not free of frightening labor, having passed every night for a month in a place exposed to the northern wind, to empty and purge the vessels of the mother and the child already mentioned; to dilate them with the blow of the air and inflate them; to turn the fat and the coagulated matter that they held; and to fill them with wax of different colors.15

Desnoues describes here the preparation of a living body, able to express pain and intense sensation at an extreme moment in the confrontation between life and death. The woman is giving birth, but both she and the child are on the verge of death. Desnoues’s priority seems to be visibility in the midst of the physical experience, enabling internal parts, no matter how delicate or private, to be seen and distinguished from one another. The problems raised by bodily matter are to be avoided by the model, but much of the description seeks to give credit to the surgeon for having taken on the difficulties of working with cadavers. First is the problem of access to bodies at the hospital, which the letter attributes to the surgeon, then the work of preparing the body parts, an arduous job that entailed cleaning out the internal parts of the mother and child, including melting and diluting the fat and the birth matter.16 The transformation of the preparation with wax is addressed briefly and refers only to the fluid wax mixture injected into the veins to resemble blood, and not to the use of wax itself. The defense of Zumbo by Antonino Mongitore, published in the same journal as the letter, also in 1707, addresses just this point when Mongitore states that the merit of Zumbo’s work is not founded on any secret but asserts that “the delicacy of his taste does not allow him to expose to the public all his studies.”17 The account suggests that making anatomical preparations was already interconnected with experiments with colored wax. Yet the preparation is imagined as being much closer to the body itself, in effect reconstituted as an embalmed body rather than as a wax sculpture. Even when the transition to sculpture took place, the model continued to be made from either plaster molds taken directly from dissected body material or copies of the dissected material executed in clay or rough wax.18 This is even the reason given by Zumbo’s defender for his departure; the wax sculptor is said to have moved from the court of Cosimo de’ Medici to Genoa, and from Genoa to Marseille, because he wanted to expand his wax technique and associate himself with surgeons in order “to represent with colored wax the anatomical bodies, which the surgeon had to unpack and prepare in its natural form.”19 The collaboration, then, is presumed to emerge from separate endeavors in which one is a 132

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preparation and the other a replication. Scholars have speculated that what made the agreement between Desnoues and Zumbo important is that they recognized the value of joining their separate endeavors, although the question of how credit would be shared remained unresolved.20 The wax head remains an enigma, surrounded by contradictory accounts of the circumstances of its making.21 According to Desnoues, the wax head was produced in Genoa and sent to Ferdinando de’ Medici, but when there was no response, Zumbo left for Marseille. Underlying these uncertainties is the ambiguous status occupied by Zumbo himself in relation to artistic and anatomical practices.22 Zumbo’s reputation as a wax sculptor was based on the invention of wax techniques that enabled him to simulate bodily corruption, especially in a series of theater tableaus, now also at La Specola, that present the effects of time and disease on the body.23 The human body is displayed at different stages of corruption and in a world of irreversible decomposition. As François Cagnetta has argued, the decomposing cadaver was the focus of Zumbo’s imagery and, unusually, it drew less on Christian iconography than on processes of natural mutation and transformation.24 Paradoxically, the very experimental wax techniques used by Zumbo to simulate bodily demise opened up the means to counter, through the wax model, the problems of rapid deterioration confronted by anatomical research. Zumbo’s unusual wax “theaters,” produced in the context of the 1657 outbreak of bubonic plague in Naples, cannot, in spite of scholarly attempts, be separated from the anatomical model of the head. A 1707 assessment of the “theatri” offers an interesting insight: “[He] has a singular idea that finds in the sculptor a force that surprises the imagination. This is called ‘Corruption.’ . . . There are some figures colored in a natural way that represent a dying man, a dead body, and one that begins to become corrupted, one that is corrupted, and finally a cadaver full of putridness and being eaten by vermin; which cannot be looked at without horror, so ingeniously is the sculptor known to configure the truth.”25 The notion of corruption, not only as a condition of the human body but also as a means of unleashing the imagination, is said to reveal the truth no less forcefully than knowledge produced by objective observation. This shocking disclosure of bodily demise, however, is dependent on the process of bodily mutation in relation to the ability of wax as a material to be situated between the corruptibility of the body and the permanence of other sculpture materials such as marble.26 Truth in resemblance was crucial to the early modern replication of the “living” body in wax, but truth did not mean simply the simulation of physical appearance. As is well known, Zumbo’s wax sculpture shared concerns not only with the study of the physical and physiological properties of the human body but also with devotional imagery and portraiture, and especially with wax effigies intended to produce change.27 The long-standing use of wax as a means of conveying the transformation in the human body included effigies of the dead used to accompany them in the B e t w e e n Fa c e a n d B r a i n

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afterlife, discussed by Julius von Schlosser, and ex-votos that replicated body parts affected by accidents and illness in order to seek divine intervention.28 In these religious practices, as with relics and miraculous images, resemblance between the body and the wax replica depended on a mixture of likeness and bodily contact.29 For instance, during the plague of 1657, people turned to inexpensive religious prints to heal themselves and projected a connection not only between the humble image and its miraculous prototype but also between the image and their own bodies, regardless of the degree of physical similarity.30 This concept of resemblance, in which a sense of presence produces a desire for bodily contact, is at work in the model of the head, even if its mimetic properties became more valued once it was located in the context of anatomical study. Evidence of his experimentation with colored wax reveals Zumbo’s growing collaborations with medical research and human remains, although he seems also to have continued to produce tableaus.31 It is likely that Zumbo, after leaving Siracusa, his birthplace, and spending time in Naples and Rome, moved around various cities in northern Italy, and that he continued his earlier study of the human body in the context of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence.32 In 1756, Giuseppe Bianchi, conservator of the Medici gallery, reported that Zumbo revealed an unusual commitment to knowledge of the body, and that he modeled his wax head on an actual head that he studied in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova during the annual anatomical exercises.33 Desnoues, however, claimed that the head entailed the use of various heads of people who had been decapitated.34 The 1707 letter states that the general intendant of the Galleries of France, Jean-Louis de Montmort, invited Zumbo to Marseille, after knowing him in Genoa, and provided him with a young surgeon to help with the dissection of heads from the hospital. Cagnetta has determined from different accounts that many heads were dissected and at least forty cadavers from the hospital were used as models for the anatomical head.35 The head received attention from several officials of the court, and on May 25, 1701, Zumbo was invited to show his anatomical model to the Académie Royale des Sciences, which in turn led Louis XIV to award him a monopoly on anatomical preparations in colored wax.36 The whereabouts of the model that was kept in the cabinet of the king of France remains unknown. In 1974, Cagnetta proposed that it was a wax head found in Paris at the Jardin des Plantes in the National Museum of Natural History, but the engraving included in the 1749 Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du roi, by French naturalist Georges-Louis Laclerc, comte de Buffon, and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, conservator of the scientific materials of the museum of the king, shows otherwise (fig. 45).37 While scholars have searched for other models and have claimed that Zumbo produced a number of anatomical heads in the 1690s—the years he spent between Florence, Bologna, Genoa, and Marseille—very little attention has been given to the conceptual distinctions of the wax models 134

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Figure 45. Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, dissected head, from Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du roi (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749), 228, plate 9. Engraving. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

attributed to him or to their relationship to the history of the wax model.38 Recently, another model of the head in wax, also in Florence and, since 1848, in the teaching collection of the Accademia di Belle Arti, has received attention.39 Although this wax head was, according to documents in the Accademia’s archive, presented in 1859 by the sculptor Pietro Pisano when he joined the academy, the model incorporates a human cranium, an unusual feature outside the field of anatomical modeling. The Accademia was also involved in the sale of Zumbo’s works, including the model of the head now in La Specola, at the end of the eighteenth century, when the heir of the Medici left Florence for Vienna. On the advice of members of the Accademia, the wax sculptures were sold to and resituated in the new anatomical museum.40 Not that Zumbo’s wax sculptures were ever fully incorporated into the new anatomical museum. In the systematization of the Royal Museum in the 1770s, Zumbo’s works, especially the “theatri,” came under criticism by the naturalists and were rejected in relation to both antique sculpture and anatomical works; they were ultimately included in the museum but separated from “naturalia” and portrayed as examples of “Tuscan artisanal traditions” in the field of wax modeling.41 B e t w e e n Fa c e a n d B r a i n

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The Face and the Brain: Two Interiorities When Zumbo’s wax head first became known, the question of where and how it should be displayed was unresolved. If it did enter Cosimo III de’ Medici’s collection in the 1690s, as some scholars argue, it was probably placed in one of the cabinets of curiosities, which housed wondrous objects with unusual effects based on the creative use of precious materials.42 As a severed head in transition between life and death, it might well have been displayed with other replicas of severed heads, whether of martyrs or criminals. Before the anatomical wax model was established as a category, Zumbo’s wax head could be confused for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. An example of the severed head of the Baptist, attributed to Juan de Mesa and in the museum of the Cathedral of Seville, invites the close observation of the crucial transition between life and death (plate 15).43 The saint’s head lies on its side and through the nuances of a face convulsed in pain demonstrates the achievement in the prolonged process of transformation. The head, which is made of polychromed wood, hovers over a silver platter, enabling the transitional state to be observed as an intermediate image between the face and the cut across the neck. The cut is decisive, violently dividing the body into two and demonstrating considerable interest in anatomical knowledge. Its surface evokes its proximity to the moment of execution and makes internal bodily matter as intriguing as the face itself. The face—eyes and mouth still open, focused outward and grimacing—externalizes the interior, as blood spills from the mouth and stains the edges of the skin at the neck. Face and cut become analogous, each depending on the other for legibility by accumulating and reflecting the intensity of the suffering. Indeed, the cut becomes another face. Its surface formed by the cut, and especially the overt display of the severing of bones, including the crucial breathing passage, recalls the underside of the skull and death at its most irrevocable. The image of violence is produced through the sharp edges of the bones, which evoke the tools required to achieve such a brutal cut, and brings with it the fuller narrative implications of John’s decapitation. Zumbo’s wax model is displayed in the prone position of the Baptist’s head and even rests upon a white cloth—replicated in wax—that could serve to hold a relic as much as to protect parts of the body during dissection. The pose invites the close observation of the surface and the possibility to penetrate into the interior of the head, but the two—surface and interior—are no longer distinguishable. From the facial hair that hovers above the surface skin to the crevices that punctuate the head, there is no separation between outside and inside. Passages that lead inward—the nostrils, the ear canal, the hollow areas between nerves and around the eyes—suggest something beyond, yet the dissected left side of the face also reveals, through the meticulous layering of wax, complex intersections that bring every inward opening back to the surface. These openings include both those made through dissection and those that are part of the head. But if the latter—ear, nostrils, and mouth— promise a way into the interior, they are already filling up with fluids oozing from 136

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the deteriorating flesh. Ultimately, there is no possibility of penetrating beyond the surface, as the surface and the inside are one. Even the indentations in the skull below the surface reveal a void beneath. The specter of the skull reminds one of the importance of the senses in linking outside and inside, but only as they are closing down. The eyes that barely see, the nose that cannot smell, and the ears that no longer hear all will end the person, as well as what remains of recognition and signification. Within the narrative of John the Baptist, the connection between face and interiority suggests the impossibility of separating oneself from one’s own body.44 As discussed in the introduction, in Christian theology, the image of the head of Saint John the Baptist marks the key transition from prophet to Son of God and from body to image. There is in Mesa’s head a sense of being in between life and death, face and neck, animation and stillness, earthly and sacred, collapse and achievement. Zumbo’s head increases this state of being in between by blurring the boundaries that define the “in between.” The impossibility of separating face and flesh brings intensity to the experience of sensation and makes the suffering at the foundation of anatomical knowledge explicit. There is no separation of oneself from oneself, and there is no possibility of seeing the transition from life to death beyond the transience of bodily matter.45 For a transition to take place, we must stop seeing only the face and start seeing the body. When one starts to move around the cabinet and contemplates the cut on the neck, one realizes that, unlike John the Baptist’s head, Zumbo’s wax head is shown to be neither discrete nor self-sufficient. Instead, it transcends its physical boundaries. It is open not only to what lies below—the rest of the body—but also to the outside. The top of the skull has been sawn off horizontally and the interior is now out—in particular, half of the brain has been entirely removed and is displayed nearby. The emptied part of the cranium is as important as what it contains, for it allows one to see from the inside out, with a thin, almost translucent layer of green wax defining the outer walls of the internal cavity. In spite of being a severed head, this viewpoint suggests the continuity that exists between the head and the rest of the body. Elizabeth Harvey suggests that Zumbo’s head is “bifurcated, one half a sculpture and the other an anatomical model,” with the goal of claiming wax’s links to both artistic traditions and the future of scientific models.46 While I am arguing instead for a state of in-betweenness in the transition from life to death and from form to formlessness, there is an interesting intersection between sculptural form and anatomical dissection. If the anatomical cut seems to contain form, even as it is tearing open the body, the sculptural form is used to open up the body to multiple dimensions, even as it is seeking to retain its structure. Wax draws on its plasticity to deploy a sculptural strategy frequently used in relation to portraiture. Instead of deploying wax as the malleable and decomposing matter that mimics bodily mutability, the head as a whole was conceived as an assemblage, formed B e t w e e n Fa c e a n d B r a i n

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through parts that are cut apart and could be conjoined or pulled apart to offer multiple views from the same entity. A wax portrait of a woman, also from the late seventeenth century and now at the Wellcome Collection in London, takes up the idea of an assemblage of parts but deploys wax to simulate different matter (plate 16). In this instance, the head is cut vertically in half in order to distinguish between external appearance and internal moral condition. While this is a sculptural rather than an anatomical procedure, it resembles anatomical dissection in that its goal is to access the interior and bring it into visibility. This sculptural cut, like the anatomical cut used in Zumbo’s wax head, both exposes the interior and contains the integrity of the face. But, unlike in the wax model, the cut is straight and penetrates the head all the way to the bone, revealing the skull deep within. On the surface, the woman may be at the peak of vitality, displaying perfect, smooth skin, pleasing features, and a head of golden curls, but the skull beneath is in the process of decay and corruption, as creatures slither within it. Unlike Zumbo’s head, this portrait does not limit the use of wax to the skin and flesh. The skull within, which serves as the sculptural prototype of the head, is conceived as hard bone, yet it is also made of wax.47 Other matter is replicated in wax, for example, the hard shell of the snail that crawls on the plinth and the brittle spider that moves over the surface of the skull. When it comes to the rendering of flesh and skin, wax does not bank on its potential for malleability and mutability and instead produces the stability and balance required by the idealized sculptural face. The sharp cut across the face entirely arrests rather than releasing the layers of skin and flesh. If Zumbo’s anatomical facial cut serves to interweave face and interior, this cut insists on a total separation between the two. Unexpectedly, it is in the bone rather than in the flesh that mutation takes place. The skull indicates the presence of death in the body rather than its structure. The interior, then, is always morally dubious, already infested with worms and in a physical and moral state of corruptibility. Both inside and outside are associated with death, but it is the skull that holds within the person the certainty of death, primarily because flesh is regarded as transient and bone is what remains after death to recall that someone is no more. The transition of the portrait is toward death, and its insight is that surface appearance is false precisely because it is transient. Skin and flesh, meanwhile, provide a covering for bones not to compensate for the imperfection of embodiment (as in Valverde’s restoration strategies) but to conceal the presence of death and produce the illusion of the body’s perfection. While the transient properties of the body are suppressed, the head becomes a sculptural space that opens up multiple views and even a different relation to time. The portrait may define the body in moral terms, but it also projects the present into the future, when the inside will become the outside. The wax head that Zumbo presented to the French Academy of Sciences in 1700 seems to have demonstrated the idea of the wax model as a spatial mechanism for observation, even more so than the model now in La Specola (fig. 45). The 1749 138

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­ istoire naturelle, which starts the catalogue of the king’s collection with Zumbo’s H model, includes an engraving with three views of an upright head supported by a strong neck, fully dissected but also fully alive and seemingly unaffected by the imposition of the anatomical cut. In this instance, the associations with decapitation and suffering are omitted, and the alert, upright pose of the figure offers no resistance to the meticulous display of anatomical knowledge. The three figures represent a sequence of stages of viewing, reconstructing through the print the process of observing the wax model from all sides. The model has expanded viewing points by having the cavity of the cranium exposed on two sides and two parts of the brain displayed outside the head and in reversed positions. What is added in consistency and coherence is lost at the level of difference between the face and brain.

From Skull to Cranium Scholars have argued that the imaging of the brain presented difficulties since antiquity.48 Galen did not believe that the brain could be pictured, and he advocated direct observation and the handling of its parts.49 Zumbo’s wax model points to a difficulty that is not often considered, namely, the dominance of the face. The wax model is unusual in offering two incompatible concepts of interiority, the empathetic face that stands for the whole person and the materiality of the head, which claims to be at the center of the entire body. The head is the most privileged part of the body but, as discussed in chapter 1, it cannot be confused with the face.50 The face, as Deleuze and Guattari have argued, is not about the face or even about exchanges between human beings, but about the mechanisms that enable all signification.51 The connection between the brain and the senses, established by Galen, had been asserted in many diagrams, for instance, the diagram of the head in the 1347 copy of Avicenna’s De generatione embrionis, in which the five senses are connected to the first of five brain cells.52 In the difficult early modern attempts to bring material specificity to the brain, the face became the obligatory intermediary. In 1536, the anatomist Johann Dryander published a report on his demonstration of the head in the annual dissections at the University of Marburg. The report includes a sequence of woodcuts that show five different stages in the dissection of the head and reveal the different layers of the brain through its effects on the face (fig. 46).53 In these images, the observer assesses the brain only by confronting the diminishment of life through the expression on the face. The head sits upright, even though the process of dissection is defined in relation to the evacuation of sensory experience. The face is framed by hanging skin flaps, which have been cut into strips and now reiterate the closing down of facial features. By contrast, the opening up of the cranium reveals a bulging mound of brain matter that seems to be expanding as it is released from its container. Dryander’s images stress the process of dissection by including the instruments used to achieve different stages of the dissection. The instrument that has cut B e t w e e n Fa c e a n d B r a i n

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through the cranium and shattered its integrity is the saw, which lies on the table before the head. The semicircular shape of the saw and its jagged teeth suggest the procedure and the logic of the circular cut. The circularity of the instrument produces an analogy with the top of the cranium, so much so that the two resemble each other. This is a strategy used in martyr images to evoke the physical materiality of the severed body part. Images of Saint Agatha, for instance, recall the removal of round breasts by including the circular instrument used to cut the breasts, so much so that an analogy emerges through resemblance. The face is fully in view but shown to be already losing consciousness as its sensory system of eyes, nose, and mouth are shutting down. From one image to the other, the skin flaps seem to increasingly cover the face till it entirely disappears. When the brain itself is taken out, the viewpoint changes to the top of the head and the view of the cavity in which the brain was previously housed. A striking conjunction of face and brain is also presented in Jacopo Berengario da Carpi’s 1518 De fractura cranii (On the Fracture of the Skull or Cranium), published first in Bologna and reprinted at least six times in the next two centuries (fig. 47).54 The first early modern anatomical treatise to give a detailed account of the procedures of cranial surgery, it responded to the increasing occurrence of head injuries sustained in warfare and other forms of conflict, which presented an opportunity for the study of the brain and its functions.55 According to Berengario, injuries revealed that lesions in the anterior brain affected imagination, while those in the posterior brain affected memory and those in the middle part affected reasoning. On the title page illustration, several instruments of violence—sword, hatchet, knife, stones, and arrow—pierce a man’s head, threatening the integrity of the cranium. The face, meanwhile, which of course is associated with the skull, remains free from all injury, though it expresses the discomfort of the injuries. The front of the head (in effect the familiar face that defines the skull) is thus removed from the idea of the cranium and the concern with head injuries. The injuries pertain to the integrity of the cranium, and the medical instruments used to deal with head injuries, work, in effect, in reverse action as those that have caused the injury. The cranium, as the protector of the brain and the center of the human being, entered anatomical treatises just as the skull began to turn away from the observer. This is not to say that skulls were not used in anatomical treatises, but they were usually reserved for the decorative or allegorical elements of title pages and were rarely shown from their recognizable facial perspective. In Berengario’s treatise, this distinction is made explicitly. The treatise starts by defining the head: “Discourse on the broken continuity of the head should in proper fashion take up the head or pot or skull, which is the same among the Latins, or cranium among the Greeks, corrupted from cranyon, which is the same as ‘that which contains and is hard,’ such as the head which more correctly should be called cranium. Cranium is said to be from cras, which is head.”56 Although the skull and the cranium are treated as exchange140

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Figure 46. Johann Dryander, dissection of the head, from Anatomia capitis humani (Marburg, 1536). Woodcut. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0). Figure 47. Frontispiece from Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, De fractura cranei (1518). Engraving. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

able in the title, Berengario begins to distinguish them here as being from different cultural contexts—Latin and Greek—and as each holding different associations. The skull is associated with the husk, and thus the dry core that continues to shrink when all living matter is gone. The cranium, however, is connected with a sturdy container that needs above all else to be protected from any fracture that would interrupt its continuity. The conception of the head begins to change from an entity that stands for the face, and thus for the entire body, to a container that houses and protects the brain and is thus the center of a network of communication that encompasses the entire body. The presence of skin and flesh is minimized, as these are deemed to be no more than a shallow covering of the “real” head, with little pain or feeling. These layers are even said to be deceptive, especially when the surface conceals where a fracture of the cranium is actually located.57 Vesalius’s first discussion of the bones of the head is attentive to how the bones support the needs of the senses. He notes that the head is located at the top of the

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body because the eyes need to have an overall view of the world, and that the bones of the forehead and those that makeup the outer angle of the orbit are extremely strong and raised by parts that lie “hidden as in a recessed valley.”58 In effect, he is describing the skull and its distinctive parts. Following Galen’s example, Vesalius claims that this area of the head contains soft nerve, since the senses require soft tissue to better receive impressions.59 Yet when he continues his description of the head, turning to the overall oblong shape of the container of the brain, he argues for the need for a protective surface for the “seat of reason”: “Because the head resembles the roof of a warm house, receiving whatever smoky and vaporous wastes of the parts below that ascend upwards[,] and [because] consequently the head itself needs a more plentiful means of evacuation, the wise Parent of things shaped a helmet for the brain that is not solid everywhere but full of hollows and laced with sutures.” The description is no longer about the skull but about the cranium, which, according to Vesalius, must be helmetlike yet also include small hidden openings to allow for the circulation of the body’s “vaporous wastes.” Even the discussion of the integrity of the container changes when he argues that the main reason why the cranium is composed of overlapping bones is so that fractures can be contained and not affect the whole skull “as though a clay pot.” In response to theories that the cranium was solid, Vesalius adds that this only became the case as the body aged, in that bones converge over time but in infants are not even fully joined; the top of an infant’s head feels “like soft cheese.”60 While bones provide the structure for the building of the body, the cranium is a container that gives shape to malleable brain matter. This container, unlike the skull, also establishes a network that is connected with the rest of the body rather than holding all that is crucial to the person within itself. With this assertion regarding a strong container, the actual formation of the brain itself remained uncertain, especially since its materiality was prone to losing shape and consistency once dissected. Leonardo da Vinci was known to have deployed the sculptural technique of using a syringe to inject wax into the ventricles and, after discarding the human matter, drawing the ventricles from the wax cast.61 This wax technique, recalling the use of wax to counter the rapid deterioration of human matter in the wax model, offered a stable replacement for the body, but it did not resolve the problem of defining a distinctive form for the brain. Vesalius in fact argues against the idea that the brain has any definable form at all. In his discussion of the cranium and the different shapes that it is known to take, he remarks that the oblong sphere is usually considered, because it carries the senses, the most pleasing and the most natural by physicians, even Galen. But differences of shape have less to do with nature than with cultural preferences: “Hippocrites [sic] attributed the cause of this shape that we call natural to midwives and nurses when he states that some people believed elongated heads were beautiful and therefore compressed the head of infants into that shape and finally heads were reproduced by nature in this oblong shape. It is known that many nations acquire 142

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some unique quality in the shape of their head.”62 This is not the only instance in which Vesalius admits that even the body’s bone structure is open to adjustment. According to Vesalius, the brain is able to accommodate itself to its given container without affecting the person’s intelligence. But with the cranium (rather than the skull) as the focus of attention, Vesalius insists that while shape is irrelevant to the functioning of the brain, the integrity of the container is crucial. In representing the bulk, weight, and substances of the brain, the strategies of wax sculpture proved particularly effective. In Zumbo’s wax model, the brain is separated into two symmetrical lobes that retain the shape of their container. The internal parts seem to be able to be moved around and reassembled into other formations. Thus the potential views are multiplied not only by the viewer’s ability to move around the model but also by the variables introduced through the cut of dissection. From the half of the brain still inside the cranium, one can assess the outer surface of the brain but also its full depth, as the cut offers a cross section of the brain from top to bottom, revealing what lies at the center. The half of the brain on display outside the cranium is turned so that its underside is most visible, and its interconnecting veins and arteries suggest how the links can be made. The brain is presented as an assemblage rather than the fully integrated biological entity that forms the face. As an assemblage, it is organized to best reveal visually the density of the brain matter while suggesting a sequence of proliferating circular formations.

The Cross-Section Cut and the Cranium as Face The increasing focus on the cranium also brought attention to the possibilities of the cross-section cut, which offered an alternative to dissecting the body in relation to its layers and organs and a way to deal with the dominant place of the face. Berengario’s Isagogae Breves (Short History of Anatomy), published in many editions from 1522, offers an intriguing description of the cut of the cranium that was to be anatomy’s first and most dominant cross section of the body: “If you should cut an onion through the middle, you could see and enumerate all the coats or skins, which circularly clothe the centre of this onion. Likewise if you should cut the human head through the middle, you would first cut the hair, then the scalp, the muscular flesh and the pericranium, then the cranium and, in the interior, the aura mater, the pia mater and the brain, then again the pi, the aura mater, the rete mirabile and their foundation, the bone.”63 The anatomical cut of the head reveals not only the brain but all of its components within a concentric flat surface. By drawing a parallel to the cutting of an onion, Berengario conceives of the head as a set of circles organized around a central core, the brain. As in the onion, the layers repeat themselves, and after reaching the center they reverse their order and form a mirror image of the other half. The brain is at the center, but other matter—skin, flesh, bone—must be crossed before reaching it, departing from the conception of the three abstract cells B e t w e e n Fa c e a n d B r a i n

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of the brain and turning the brain into an anatomical structure. With the brain conjoined to a dissected body increasingly known for the shape of its internal parts and organs, the cross section enabled a visual format to be associated with the brain, even if it could not be three-dimensional. The familiar parallel to cooking is particularly effective in transforming a shapeless, three-dimensional structure into a twodimensional flat surface. In effect, this cut reorients knowledge of the head from the verticality of the face to the horizontality of the cross section of the head. Vesalius explains in considerable detail how to saw the upper part of the cranium in order to get a full anatomical view of the head, referring to “the manner by which we regularly divide the head with a saw to show the fabric of the brain.” An image that accompanies this discussion shows the cranium entirely empty, from the inside.64 Vesalius does not waste the opportunity to note how consistent its circumference is, or to erase the memory of the face (and skull) that lies just on the outer side of the cranium. In Vesalius’s chapter on the head—chapter 7—this procedure is discussed again, this time in relation to the head and what it contains. But the point is no longer about seeing it in relation to the skull and the senses but about seeing the interior of the cranium in the context of the head as a whole. In the sequence of images that follow, the view is from above the head, recalling the radical change of perspective imposed by the back of the head of Zumbo’s wax model. Vesalius, like Dryander, displays the dissection of the head as a sequence of images, ten in total. But, unlike in Dryander’s work, the face no longer serves to situate the functioning of the brain. In these images, there is no frontal view of the face, but what can be seen of it—part of the hair, the upper lip—is seen from unusual angles that do not allow a face-to-face encounter. In the first image, the removal of the top of the cranium reveals not the usual mound of soft curling brain tissue but a flat surface that is mirrored in two halves. In addition to the removal of the skullcap, the cerebrum has been cut horizontally, the occipital lobes removed, the pineal gland exposed, and the outer gray matter distinguished from the inner white matter.65 The cross section was one of a number of techniques for portraying anatomical structures introduced by Leonardo da Vinci.66 This kind of cut allowed for a new image of the brain to be revealed, one that eventually replaced the conception of this organ as a mere container for the soul, or a site for the mind, or even a vehicle for sensory communication between mind and body. These new techniques produced changing conceptions of interiority, in which all body parts and functions, as well as mental activities, were connected to one another through the brain. In Vesalius’s progression of the dissection, the cranium as a three-dimensional container is displaced by the two-dimensional image produced by the slicing of the brain itself into a cross-section view. The cross section no longer deals with particular organs or other entities in the body but with a view of the interrelation of things, including things that cannot be identified. In these images, the cross section of the head resembles a mapping of territories that are defined in terms of boundaries, bodies of land 144

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or water, and changing terrain. The attempts to clarify the terrain are invariably thwarted by what remains ambiguous or even entirely unknown. The flat surface of a three-dimensional entity is developed in Charles Estienne’s treatise De dissectione partium corporis humani (On the Dissection of the Human Body), first published in 1545 in Paris. Estienne is given credit for being ahead of his contemporaries in accurately visualizing, among other things, the cerebral ventricles, the central canal of the spinal cord, and the spinal nerves.67 The treatise demonstrates, step by step, the removal of the coverings of the brain, once again in a series of images, but instead of using a severed head, the images situate the dissection within fully fleshed-out bodies in motion. In all the engravings, the head stands as an image within an image, a device Estienne uses in other engravings as well. The forceful and athletic male body demonstrates the mobility of the human body and becomes a frame for the head.68 Within the sequence of images, the head is increasingly dissected, and the figures initially move within theatrical landscapes that include classical architectural fragments. As the dissection progresses, the body starts to lose energy, to stumble over the things in the landscape, and even to drag itself with enormous effort. When the dissection reaches its culmination, which is the revelation of the brain through the cross section, the figures move beyond a state of stasis and enter one that entails torture and suffering. One of these engravings shows the upper half of the body bent over a dissection table, the face hidden against the wooden surface, arms hanging forward (fig. 48). The cross section of the brain, rather than the face, confronts the viewer, while two instruments lie on the table, suggesting how new technologies for anatomical examination allowed deeper investigation of the brain. But the figure who supports himself on the dissection table, his muscular body seeming too bulky to be thus supported, offers another disconcerting juxtaposition. If Zumbo’s model produces contradictory interiorities and a discomforting lack of fit between sensation and observation, Estienne’s merges the flat abstract surface of a cross section of the head with a forceful body, no less so for being tortured and killed. The tension between the abstraction of the map and the three-dimensional bulk of the replica seems to suggest an irreconcilable discontinuity, a rupture between the assemblage of the head and human embodiment. This cross section of the brain is made from a separate plate than the rest of the print, and as the part of the image that carries most of the anatomical information, it is presented as being in progress. The engraving, like others in the same treatise of eroticized women, which combine an image of anatomical information within a mythological frame, suggests that the technology is able to update images in relation to new findings. The insertion of a plate within a plate also seems to imply a kind of imprint of the structural ground plan upon which the body’s animation operates. By mapping out connections and disruptions, it conceives of circuits within the entire body rather than a center point in which everything is situated. Perhaps it is worth B e t w e e n Fa c e a n d B r a i n

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Figure 48. Figure on table with cross section of the brain, from Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres (Paris: S. Colinaeus, 1545). Engraving. Courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine.

mentioning that unlike Vesalius, whose treatise offers a complex relationship between text and image, Estienne claims that the visual image conveys knowledge that the text cannot. Thus, while the map is elaborate, the text insists on unknown territories, calling up the terra incognita of cartography, which implies both the effort to fill in this gap and its insistent presence. In Estienne’s images, the cross section as a flat surface of a three-dimensional entity turns into a cartographic rendering of the world’s surface. These images devote more attention to the cerebral cortex containing the ventricles and attribute to the whole brain the physical and mental capacities that characterize the human being. Estienne’s cross sections present the ventricles inserted in approximate locations, and the cerebral convolutions, although inaccurately depicted, start to appear. Indeed, the cartographic view did not mean that there was an assertion of fully realized knowledge. Like cartography, the cross section opened up awareness of the unknown and of the relationship between the raw matter of the body and the 146

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abstraction of the image. It has been argued that Vesalius’s investigations of the structure of the brain retained a focus on earlier notions of the cells, and that the brain stem and nerves were not accurately represented, perhaps because of the instability of the tissue or faulty removal from the cranium.69 But Vesalius did not claim full knowledge of the workings of the brain, as the visual evidence could not be matched with its actual effects and purposes: “I can in some degree follow the brain’s functions in dissections of living animals, with sufficient probability and truth, but I am unable to understand how the brain can perform its office of imagining, meditating, thinking, and remembering, or following various doctrines, however you may wish to divide or enumerate the powers of the Reigning Soul.”70 It is striking that Estienne’s figures rarely, if ever, reveal their faces. Attention has now moved from the sensorial organs believed to communicate with the soul to the body as a system that responds to the impulses of the brain and ceases movement once these impulses are interrupted. Yet the cross section of the head as map always has the potential to turn back into the face. The map as surface is now in the place of the surface of the face. Estienne’s figures are particularly susceptible, as they literally replace the face with the map and retain the bodily framework. If there is now an intermediary between the face and the processes of mutation and death so vividly restored by Zumbo, there can be little doubt that the formation of the map, like its location in the place of the face, raises that possibility. The mapping of the head as the undoing of the face is part of early modern cartography.71 It is also in cartography that the head as empty container moves toward ideas of the world as globe, as empty sphere, and as an undesirable focus. Each register of vision is transformed into the other. Each is needed to complete the other, but at the same time each undoes the other’s claims. It is this process that is at work in Zumbo’s model of the head. If the face of the skull means nothing while encroaching on everything, the imaging of the head as unknown territory showed it to be, like death, out of the reach of meaning. A similar kind of possibility for mapping the head and changing the relation of knowledge and death appears in Berengario da Carpi’s 1522 Isagogae Breves, and in this case, the potential of the cartographic rendition of the body can be taken even further.72 The open cranium and its cross section is shown as a map, which, I would suggest, resembles the 1516 map of the island of Utopia in the first edition of Thomas More’s work by that name (fig. 49). Interestingly enough, this map has sometimes been conceived as a type of skull and associated with utopia as a space of death.73 In Utopia, the journey is long and treacherous and opens up a neutral space, a space of the imagination that is always combined with the desire to go beyond the limits and there encounter death.74 This is an imaginative conception of the head divided into different territories within a centralized island and with a central artery that flows across and around, dividing and joining as necessary. Like Utopia, it is outside representation, not yet fully an image that can be retraced or found on a map, yet it B e t w e e n Fa c e a n d B r a i n

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Figure 49. Frontispiece from Thomas More, Utopiae insulae figura (Habsburg: More, 1516). Woodcut. Wikimedia Commons / Kharmacher.

extends itself beyond the head, as it cannot be fully recognized and thus cannot be stopped. In the second edition, of 1518, the island of Utopia became connected to the external world while also harboring within itself the skull, the smirking expression of which, once recognized, cannot be ignored. Here, the map turns back to skull, and the face back to sensation, mutation, and death. Cartography brought about a new surgical cut of the body, the cross section, which, like early modern maps, does not ignore the indivisible link between exploration and violence. Even the mapping of the imaginary land of Utopia is used in the anatomical print to link the search for knowledge with the unleashing of violence. 148

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plates

Plate 1. Annibale Carracci, An Execution, ca. 1600. Drawing. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2021. Plate 2. Monastery of San Giovanni Decollato, Rome. Photo by author.

Plate 3. Unknown, Flagellation, Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, ca. 1560. Painted tavoletta. Oil on panel, approx. 18 × 24 in. Photo by author. Plate 4. Unknown, Deposition, Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, ca. 1560. Painted tavoletta. Oil on panel, approx. 18 × 24 in. Photo by author.

Plate 5. Unknown, Crucifixion, Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, ca. 1560. Painted tavoletta. Oil on panel, approx. 18 × 24 in. Photo by author.

Plate 6. Detail of marks on surface of Deposition, ca. 1560. Painted tavoletta. Oil on panel, approx. 18 × 24 in. Photo by author. Plate 7. Unknown, St. John the Baptist, Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, ca. 1550. Painted tavoletta. Oil on panel, approx. 18 × 24 in. Photo by author.

Plate 8. Aelbert Jansz van der Schoor, Still Life with Skulls, ca. 1650. Oil on canvas, 25 × 28.7 in. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Plate 9. The death of the eleven thousand virgins, St. Albans Chronicle, ca. 1420. Manuscript illumination. Reproduced with permission from Lambeth Palace Library.

Plate 10. Reliquaries of the eleven thousand virgins, ca. 1600. Church of St. Ursula, Cologne. Photo by author.

Plate 11. Two of the skulls of the eleven thousand virgins, Il Gesù, Rome. Photo by author.

Plate 12. Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, head (front), wax model, ca. 1690. La Specola, Florence. Sistema Museale dell’Università degli Studi di Firenze. Photo by author. Plate 13. Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, head (underside), wax model, ca. 1690. La Specola, Florence. Sistema Museale dell’Università degli Studi di Firenze. Photo by author.

Plate 14. Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, head (back), wax model, ca. 1690. La Specola, Florence. Sistema Museale dell’Università degli Studi di Firenze. Photo by author.

Plate 15. Juan de Mesa, St. John the Baptist, ca. 1625. Polychrome wood. Museum of Cathedral of Seville. Wikimedia Commons / Carlos V de Habsburgo (CC BY 4.0).

Plate 16. Unknown, Portrait of a Woman (Vanitas), ca. 1690. Wax. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

Plate 17. Anna Morandi Manzolini, Self Portrait, ca. 1760. Wax. Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Courtesy of the Università di Bologna / Sistema Museale di Ateneo / Museo di Palazzo Poggi. Photo by author.

Plate 18. Ercole Lelli, female wax model (Eve), from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47. Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Courtesy of the Università di Bologna / Sistema Museale di Ateneo / Museo di Palazzo Poggi. Photo by author.

Plate 19. Ercole Lelli, female model (Eve) and skeleton, from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47. Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Courtesy of the Università di Bologna / Sistema Museale di Ateneo / Museo di Palazzo Poggi. Photo by author. Plate 20. Ercole Lelli, male wax model (Adam), from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47. Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Courtesy of the Università di Bologna / Sistema Museale di Ateneo / Museo di Palazzo Poggi. Photo by author.

Plate 21. Ercole Lelli, figure with second layer of muscles, from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47. Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Courtesy of the Università di Bologna / Sistema Museale di Ateneo / Museo di Palazzo Poggi. Photo by author. Plate 22. Jan Gossaert, Adam and Eve, ca. 1520. Oil on panel, 5.54 × 3.65 feet. National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons / BotMultichill.

Plate 23. Detail of Ercole Lelli, female model (Eve), from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47. Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Courtesy of the Università di Bologna / Sistema Museale di Ateneo / Museo di Palazzo Poggi. Photo by author. Plate 24. Unknown, God Clothes Adam and Eve with Skin Tunics, 17th century. Oil on canvas attached to panel. Approx. 4 × 4 feet. Choir, San Francisco, Quito, Ecuador. Project on the Engraved Sources of Spanish Colonial Art 2097B.

Plate 25. Detail of Ercoli Lelli, female model (Eve) from the cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47. Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Courtesy of the Università di Bologna / Sistema Museale di Ateneo / Museo di Palazzo Poggi. Photo by author. Plate 26. Ava encounters her face, from the film Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland, 2014. Still photo by author.

The Reassemblage of Face and Brain The confrontation between face and cranium continued to be an issue in seventeenthcentury attempts to bring visual form to the brain, and it did not disappear with the emergence of the wax model in the eighteenth century. In Anna Morandi Manzolini’s wax self-portrait, at the center of her cabinet of wax models in Bologna, the anatomist and wax modeler conducts an anatomical demonstration on a severed head that has been cut across the top of the cranium (plate 17).75 Morandi, owing to financial need, arranged in 1769 to have Senator Girolamo Ranuzzi acquire the large number of wax models she had produced during the previous decade for the Institute of Sciences and the Accademia Clementina.76 The transaction included an apartment in his palace, which she would use as studio and as a space to display the large collection together with the self-portrait, her anatomical and sculpture tools, and her books, including the treatises of Vesalius and Valverde.77 The wax Self Portrait, executed around 1760, overlaps with the surrounding wax models, sharing their status as both mimetic and representational images of the body. But it also serves as a simulation, which Louis Marin defines as a replica that provides a dialogue on the implications of replication, in this case of the replication of the body as wax model, and the wax model as visual display.78 The elegant figure of the anatomist, fitted within a glass cabinet at approximately human height, stands over the severed head, which, wrapped in white cloth, is set on a small wooden platform that rests on the same wooden stand as Morandi’s own body. The lifelike portrait is juxtaposed with the lifeless severed head, and yet it is Morandi’s body that maintains a palpable stillness, while the brain matter emerges from the opening of the cranium, threatening to overflow. The white cloth, instead of providing support to a precious object, as in the case of Zumbo’s head, appears to suppress the potential spillage. Yet the white cloth does contain something remarkable: the absence of the face. Messy clumps of human hair still hang on over layers of muscle and skin flaps, indicating the destruction involved in reaching the cranium. It would seem that the concealment of the face by the white cloth reveals that the most familiar part of the head can no longer be exposed to public view. The absence of this face turns all attention to the other face. Morandi’s commanding presence holds the eyes of all around her. It is always noted with some surprise that she conducts the anatomy lesson in the formal attire of a woman of high social rank, wearing a fashionable silk and lace pink dress, multiple strings of pearls, and rings and bracelets that call attention to her elegant hands. Yet the violation of the severed head, especially the undoing of the face to open the cranium, has required force and will, an activity for which Morandi frequently was given special credit in the assumption that this would have been particularly unpleasant for a woman.79 While Morandi’s image works as a wax effigy, the double of her body secured within its wooden cabinet, the severed head’s relation to its wood support, B e t w e e n Fa c e a n d B r a i n

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and the miniaturized dissecting table signal only its further fragmentation. Morandi’s ideal double seeks to counter anatomy’s destructive force. Yet with the particular properties of the materiality of wax, the divide between coherence and fragmentation is less secure. Morandi’s body is itself a fragment, even if it manages to conceal its partial state within the conventions of the marble bust portrait. The body is extended well below the usual cut of limbs and body in traditional bust portraits, and includes the arms and hands so crucial to Morandi’s professional claims as both anatomist and wax sculptor. The formal pose of the bust portrait also disguises its fragmentary state, giving the appearance of uniformity and wholeness. The portrait is made from a supportive wooden structure built outward with layers of wax, but the rectangular and symmetrical surfaces appear as if the figure has been cast, a practice already common in the making of wax models. The solidity of the face enables the head under dissection to become the brain, no longer vying for attention with Morandi’s face and its claims to meaning. The erasure of the other face only asserts the status of body part as dead flesh, something that distinguishes it from Morandi’s wax models, which for the most part focus on the physiological rather than the physical workings of the body. However, by bringing the anatomical work on the brain into direct relation with the experimental wax models of the human senses, Morandi’s Self Portrait points to the work still to be done to be turned into a model. The anatomy lesson proclaims the brain to be the primary part of the head, and the wax anatomical model the most effective way to produce both physical and physiological knowledge.80 The implication is that the dissection of the head during an anatomy lesson is only the first in a series of stages that entail the translation of transient material evidence into a permanent wax model that itself will expand upon research and teaching when displayed with other wax models. Of course, the bodily fragment of the head is already a wax sculpture, modeled by Morandi herself, but one that seeks to evoke the transience and instability of the human body. In the process of being extricated from the rest of the body, the brain is literally emerging, and it is more animated than Morandi’s own living body because it is both losing its grip on life and coming into being as knowledge. In the preparation of the brain on display in Frederik Ruysch’s museum in Amsterdam, recorded in a 1744 print, the process works in reverse (fig. 50).81 Within the neat cross-section cut of the cranium, the blood vessels are being injected with a waxlike serum that Ruysch claimed arrested the natural deterioration of color and shape. The face of both the dissected head and the anatomist conducting the procedure is cut or inverted, discouraging the observer from any kind of proximity, to the point that the anatomist even uses a strawlike tool with his mouth to inject the serum. In Ruysch’s print, the fear of the destructive power of touch pertains to the delicacy of brain matter and its blood vessels, a consideration in the insertion of wax if the preparation was to retain the properties of the living brain. This is in contrast to Morandi’s demonstration, in which 150

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Figure 50. Preparation of brain engraving, from Frederik Ruysch, Epistola anatomica (Amsterdam: Jansonio-Waesbergios, 1744), plate 10. Engraving. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

the head, represented as dead bodily matter, is juxtaposed with the hands that have brought it into view and will soon transform it into something with new potential. The sense of touch—whether the desire to touch or the fear of touch—is also unleashed by Zumbo’s head and pertains to the experience of contact between the anatomist and the head, or, for that matter, between observer and observed. The worry may not be about damaging the disintegrating flesh, since the skillful application of wax provides new stability to the mutating body. Instead, it is about the implications of the proximity between the observer and the observed, which are both destructive and productive. With the highly malleable medium of wax, the issue of touch and bodily contact takes on particular implications. As Morandi’s self-portrait is built up in layers and by hand, this body, one presumes, carries within it traces of the actual body that made it and that it represents. Touch, then, is a contact point not only between Morandi and the object of medical study but also between Morandi and her own effigy. Effigy is perhaps the correct term for an image that insists on the continuity

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of physical contact between image and body. Michael Taussig points out that “an effigy is not always identical to the body it replicates but what makes up for this lack of similitude, what makes it a ‘faithful’ copy, indeed a magically powerful copy, are precisely the material connections—those established by attaching of hair, nail cuttings, pieces of clothing and so forth, to the likeness.”82 The self-portrait can be said to present an imperfect likeness, partly because it strives for an idealized appearance. Yet every attempt is made to retain physical contact between the selfportrait and Morandi’s own body. The fashionable hair, curled back from the face in meticulous ringlets, is made of human hair and was reported to be taken partly from her own head, as were the eyelashes and eyebrows. The lavish dress and the prominent ring on the crucial right hand were known to have been her own. The scalpel and tweezers are missing, and for this very reason extend this connection by evoking the actual hands that cut the head and that made, or will make, the wax model of the brain.83 This interface among sculptural, mechanical, and crafted modes of production is further complicated by the deployment of close anatomical observation, in relation not only to the decapitated head but also to the wax self-portrait. For all the attempts to draw distinctions between the fullness of the portrait and the fragmentation of the part in the making, the two share the attentive discernment of bodily formations. While the distance implied by the performance of the anatomical lecture sustains the appearance of flawless skin, close observation of Morandi’s Self Portrait reveals distinctive imperfections: a wart above the upper right lip is punctured by a protruding hair, a scar above the left eyebrow suggests the body’s history, the shaving of an untidy nail evokes the contingencies of the moment. Changing the view disrupts the overall symmetry and exposes that which had been camouflaged with makeup, jewelry, and lace: a protruding double chin and an awkward flabby earlobe. The masklike face begins to find its specificity in unflinching details that disrupt perfection but increase the likeness and the possibility of a verifiable personalized identification.84 According to Victor Stoichita, the early modern self-portrait signaled a new concept of authorship that explored the incompatibility between the work and the making of the work, pitting the representation of the sitter against the process through which the embodied maker becomes a representation. Stoichita notes that the instruments used to make the image are often shown, but only in order to dissociate them from the artist, providing the necessary cut between representation and embodiment.85 In Morandi’s self-portrait, the relationship between representation and embodiment remains unresolved, especially because of the unsettling relation between the effigy and the dissected head. Morandi’s face seems caught in a contradiction between a physical presence that draws one near and a strange state of stillness that keeps one at bay. Morandi commands the space with her eyes and directs the viewer’s attention to the abject head, which, even while reduced to anonymity, 152

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reveals the force of the undulating delicate brain tissue. But the head encourages the sense of touch, especially because of its proximity to the hands that convert it first into bodily fragment and then into wax model. The portrait’s seeing face becomes separated from the lower body, with its active, agile hands, which nonetheless negotiate between the commanding presence of the anatomist and the revulsion of touching the disintegrating head. Lucia Dacome argues that Morandi’s hands evoke touch, and especially the gesture of needlework, to reconcile Morandi’s respectable female social status with her skills in a profession that entailed cutting up bodies.86 The tools and practices of domestic life frequently intersected with those of anatomical dissection, but in the Self Portrait the hands seem to be doing a great deal of work to bring into dialogue the dissection of the body and the making of the wax model. The portrait’s elaboration of delicate fabrics, complicated appliqué, and ornate stitching does raise the relation between textiles and bodily tissue, and in this respect entangles Morandi’s effigy with, rather than separates it from, the abject head. Bringing into view the intricacies of the body’s interior, Morandi’s elegant attire literally opens up the ­relation between her body and the dissected head. The clumps of real hair, still attached to the skull, first seem to contrast with the anatomist’s meticulously curled locks, but they start to intertwine with the decorative appliqué of the dress. The supple decorative patterns on the surface of the brain echo the layers of silk and lace on the surface of Morandi’s body. As with Zumbo’s wax model, touch is shown to be not simply an important aspect of anatomical dissection but also a way to experience the wax model itself. The hands in both Morandi’s self-portrait and her portrait of her partner and husband, Giovanni Manzolini, which was installed next to hers after his death in 1765, enact a sense of touch that pertains both to dissection and to the wax model. In her wax model of touch, enacted by two hands, Morandi divides touch into pleasure and pain, with one hand experiencing the pleasure of silk fabric and the other the pain of encountering the sharp thorns of the thistle (fig. 51).87 The stress on the activity of two hands, in both the portraits and the model of touch, is not simply about the fact that the body tends to have two hands, but also about the doubling of touch itself. Allegories of touch tend to focus on the experience of pain, in terms of the piercing of skin and flesh, the bite of birds and reptiles, or illicit sensual touch.88 These are prohibitions of touch, which, as Didier Anzieu observes in The Skin Ego, are pervasive in most cultures. But Anzieu also argues that “every prohibition is by its nature dual”—for instance, in the prohibition on touching, sexuality and aggression are not structurally differentiated psychically but are treated alike as the expression of instinctual violence in general.89 In Morandi’s wax model, one kind of touch is not the opposite of the other; rather, they are always enfolded within each other. Hands need to be given free rein of movement in order to gain the possibility of becoming self-aware and expanding knowledge. But this expansion of touch will always B e t w e e n Fa c e a n d B r a i n

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Figure 51. Anna Morandi Manzolini, model of touch, ca. 1760. Wax. Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Courtesy of the Università di Bologna / Sistema Museale di Ateneo / Museo di Palazzo Poggi. Photo by author.

include the unexpected, especially unpleasant sensation, disgust, and sudden pain, defining one’s limits in the world. The experience of touch that generates disgust and pain must also be nurtured, for otherwise touch would no longer be able to search for the limits that unsettle experience and keep touch on the move. In the context of anatomical dissection, and in relation to the brain, this unbreakable enfolding of touch and pain brings knowledge into being but also leaves little untouched by the effects of imposed violence. The disintegrating face of Zumbo’s model seems to convey quite effectively how disturbing it would be to touch the face of the model itself. But this is also the case with the brain, since it was always compared in its texture to slippery and shapeless intestines.90 In Morandi’s Self Portrait, the dissected fragment is still within the disturbing experience of the touch of the dissected human body, but if her wax models are any indication, the brain will be turned into a more manageable but also more extended form of physiological knowledge. Morandi’s effigy is ultimately a reminder of the 154

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process that will turn the brain under observation into the wax model, including its close observation and its close links to the body itself. Like an artistic production, it offers insight into its own making, but there is no ultimate separation between embodiment and representation. The focus on the cranium, and by implication the brain, had been a priority of anatomical dissection from the early sixteenth century, but almost two hundred years later, Zumbo’s wax model demonstrates that in the formation of the wax model, the face still persisted as a sign of interiority. In this instance, the solution was to separate the two. Zumbo’s model refuses to keep enough distance between observation and experience, yet succeeds in raising the possibility of an alternative focus, the ability to consider the materiality of the body not simply through its duplication but through the behavior of matter itself, especially wax and actual human bone. Within the same object, multiple fields of vision become possible, as one side of the head begets the other, but only by first erasing itself. On one side, an assemblage of parts claims distinctiveness through physical matter. On the other side, the temporality of embodiment brings forth the presence of a human being that through its material transience questions the stability of the other side. Zumbo’s head manifests both the established link between punishment and dissection by revealing the skull, and the separation of punishment and dissection by displaying the cranium. The cut of the head at the top of the cranium might no longer presume official decapitation, but its new mastery over the brain proves no less forceful and perhaps more constraining. Morandi’s Self Portrait, rather than domesticating violence, intertwines the authority of the surgeon/wax maker with the disturbing tactile experience of dissecting the body and turning it into a wax model. In Zumbo’s model, it is the anguished face that will not be forgotten, while in Morandi’s self-portrait, any reconciliation between face and brain is achieved through shared pain and violence.

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Chapter 5

The Rib Within The Wax Model and the Violence of Embodiment

E

ve pauses at a threshold, as she has so many times before (plate 18). She is about to take a small step forward, turning slightly to her right and toward a doorway that leads out of the confines of the cabinet of wax models in Bologna’s Palazzo Poggi.1 Tilting her head downward and extending her right arm across her body, she is already leaving, already detaching herself from the round platform under her feet. If we had started to think about the usual reasons for Eve’s departure from Paradise—an uncontrollable curiosity, an aversion to compliance—we now become distracted, compelled to reach out to touch her. Eye and hand work together, one sense encouraging the other; sight moves one closer, while the yearning to touch produces the inclination to move back to see. A luminous complexion extends beyond the face and even beyond the surface of the skin.2 The tones of this surface fluctuate, interrupted by patches of discoloration that seem to emerge from deep within the flesh. The human hair that covers the head, forms the eyelashes, and clusters around the labia increases the desire to touch, but without differentiating between parts of the body. She does not offer herself up to the eye, even though she conceals no part of herself. A leaf that perhaps once covered part of her body now lies discarded at her feet. Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that the desire to touch reaches a threshold just before the moment of encounter, for it is then that touch turns into a tool of knowledge, used for measurement and identification.3 Yet before reaching its goal, and while sight is still what propels desire, touch can turn into something other than a means of categorization. Touch can become the deferral of touch, dispersing rather than gathering information. The untouchable, according to Nancy, is what renders the sacred so powerful, intensifying the experience of seeking to make contact but also of imminent separation and withdrawal. The sacred, that which has been set apart from the world, is unreachable, but it summons up recognition precisely because it evokes presence, the presence of the living body. We may think that Eve has noticed us, that the delicate gesture of her arm implies a momentary pause in her move out of the cabinet, and even that her eyes will soon turn to ours. By this point, we may have lost sight of the fact that she is not alone in the anatomy cabinet. We may even have forgotten our initial assumption that she is Eve. What the identity of Eve usually seeks to bring together—a sexualized body, a narrative of temptation, an act of iniquity—is dispersed as the presence of the wax model starts to prevail. In the cabinet of anatomy, this figure has been set apart, producing an intense experience in which vision and touch are intertwined.4 The figure seizes our attention, even as she is in transit, not only out of the cabinet in which we encounter her but also from the physical perfection granted by God in Paradise to the imperfect state of corporeality in the world at large. Spaces of display, as Foucault suggested, accumulate time and even produce transitory time, in a process that entails abolishing time but also rediscovering it, “as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origins were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge.”5 For the wax model, one time is constantly intersecting with another. Something of the 157

Figure 52. Ercole Lelli, cabinet of anatomy, ca. 1742–47. Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Wikimedia Commons / Conte di Cavour.

physical perfection bestowed by the grace of God is still visible, but the figure’s sense of presence also dispels the state of permanence implied in bodily perfection, evoking the mutability of the living body. This transition overlaps with another, as the living body has gained a place in the anatomy cabinet by way of the dissection table at the center of the display. The memory of violence is embedded both in the Genesis narrative and in anatomical practice, bringing into display a body that must age, deteriorate, and die. In the cabinet of wax models designed by Ercole Lelli and installed in Bologna’s Institute of Sciences in the 1740s, the life-size wax female figure has a male counterpart, and the pair frames a sequence of four male figures at different stages of dissection (fig. 52).6 In addition to revealing the male body in increasingly fragmented states, these figures alternate with shallow cabinets displaying body parts, six sets in all. This sequence is arranged on one side of a sumptuous dissecting table, situated in 158

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the center of the room and dividing the display into distinct viewing directions.7 On the opposite side of the table, the focus is on bones, with shallow cabinets displaying groupings of bones framed by a pair of fully assembled skeletons. When viewed from the short sides of the anatomical table, the display brings together the complete figures at each end of the two sides of the scheme, forming another kind of pair—the fleshed figure juxtaposed with the articulated skeleton—now framing one of the two doorways that lead to the cabinet’s adjacent rooms (plate 19). The two female figures mimic each other’s orientation and gestures, while the pair of male figures contrast the mobility of life with the skeleton’s stillness. The representation of anatomical dissection is relocated here from the printed book to a display space organized as a public anatomy lesson in which life-size wax figures enact their own production of knowledge. Lucia Dacome argues that Bologna’s anatomy cabinet forged an alternative public space for anatomical knowledge by linking it to the annual anatomical lesson held during Carnival, and by intersecting with different kinds of knowledge on display in nearby collections.8 In this context, the presence of Adam and Eve is not unexpected, nor is their appearance as skeletons. Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg’s 1610 engraving of the new anatomical theater in Leiden, which also shows the space of the theater transformed into a cabinet of curiosities, includes elegant visitors enthusiastically discussing displays of articulated human and nonhuman animal skeletons distributed on the tiers of the theater (fig. 53).9 Two of the skeletons enact Adam and Eve’s encounter at the Tree of Knowledge with decisive articulated gestures, strategically situated in front of the dissection table. The scheme can be regarded as asserting Genesis as the point of origin for all Christian knowledge. The Dutch anatomist Pieter Pauw’s large collection of anatomical artifacts included engravings of Vesalius’s images, preserved bodily remains, and articulated skeletons with moralizing texts on the fragility of life displayed in upheld banners.10 Intriguingly, these are objects that claim nature and technology but also adopt a moralizing tone. By 1618, the year after Pauw’s death, the collection had changed, incorporating a wider range of rarities, including a more ethnographic focus on bones and skulls of people from distant territories.11 At the table in Swanenburg’s engraving, a visitor lifts a shroudlike covering to reveal an exposed human body, its limbs extended and its torso emptied of internal contents. Instruments displayed in a cabinet above the entrance to the theater evoke the violence that has produced this body, though they are now displayed in an orderly and methodical arrangement. This is death at its most punitive and brutal, the image of violence displacing the presence of the person under dissection. The space is a theater of memory as much as of objects, and the cabinet reveals death to be not only the decisive point of the living body’s transformation but also the unexpected void at the very center of the theater of observation.12 On the anatomical table, one encounters the kind of discarded body that, according to Andrea Carlino, appears in the frontispiece of early anatomical treatises but is excluded from The Rib Within

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Figure 53. Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg, Leiden Anatomy Theater, 1610. Engraving. Wikimedia Commons / Eisenacher~commonswiki.

the inside, where the reconstituted male body resides. The anatomy lesson, itself a substitute for the actual violent practices of anatomy, nonetheless reveals, partly through its association with both Carnival and the cabinets of curiosities, a body treated without care or deference. The propensity of the female body to occupy this space, while being almost absent from the anatomical treatise itself, locates the female body closer to the natural state, situated more fully within the body that suffers and dies. Both Eve and Adam may have been subjected to the Fall, but the male body’s downfall was conceived as experienced through the external world, while the female’s was situated more fully within the body itself. Perhaps this emerges most emphatically in a detail not often noticed in Swanenburg’s image: the preserved vacant skin observed by visitors on the lower right side of the outer ring of the theater. This abject specter of the human body stands not only for someone who no longer exists but also, through its transparency, for the frailty of the human condition. Another version of this print, which shows Pauw conducting a public anatomy lesson before a large audience, repeats this connection between skeletal Eve and the disemboweled corpse.13 In this instance, Eve and the empty corpse are linked by arm 160

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gestures that intertwine their fate. As in the frontispiece of Vesalius’s treatise, the skeleton prevails over the female body under dissection, an artificial body replacing another emptied of life and without possibility of reconstitution. In Bologna’s anatomy cabinet, the pair of wax models no longer oversee the production of knowledge of the body; instead, they now participate in the making of knowledge. Yet, as Adam and Eve, they evoke the biblical point of origin with its moralizing implications, while as wax models they contribute to new knowledge about the body. In fact, there are reasons to question whether they form a pair at all, either as Adam and Eve or as anatomical images of man and woman. The male figure seems confident enough, capable of demonstrating the forceful energy of the muscles and the vertical reach of the arms that reiterate the structure and agility of Vesalius’s muscle figures (plate 20). The performance of dissection is continued by the figures that follow this one, producing versions of the same man at different stages of fragmentation (plate 21). In the process, the orchestrated sequence of animation is turned into textual knowledge about the structure of the body. This is not the case with the female figure, which, while not as vigorous, is more vibrant and luminous. The female figure seems less attentive to its place in the sequence of dissection, turning away, perhaps distracted by the intensity of the moment of physical connection, or perhaps aware that there is no place for her in this production of knowledge. We cannot help but notice that the sequence of dissection is in fact about the male body, much as the sequence of display in Swanenburg’s 1610 Leiden print is about the female body. If understood as an anatomical trajectory, knowledge is not produced through both figures; rather, it starts on the left side (Adam’s side) and moves around the room toward the right, with the male body appearing in increasingly more fragmented and animated states. If understood as a biblical narrative, Adam seems to retain a perfect body, while Eve moves away, toward another kind of bodily state. For either scheme to be coherent, the female figure must depart. This is not to say that Eve carries the moral burden or that she is excluded from anatomical knowledge. On the contrary, Eve is linked to the condition of the embodied natural body. Even, or especially, when declared superior to Adam, Eve does not transcend her proximity to experiential bodily knowledge. Regardless of the interpretation, and there are numerous and diverse early modern interpretations, Eve marks the threshold for a certain kind of change, whether it is when her curiosity intensifies to the point that she eats the apple from the prohibited Tree of Knowledge and, according to Paracelsus, introduces indigestion and thus self-awareness, or when followers of Saint Augustine grant her acute senses and sense impressions that deal with “corporalia” rather than pure reason, or when John Milton insists in Paradise Lost that Eve actively desires knowledge for its own sake and must be regarded as embodying reason as well as sensory perception.14 By the time Milton’s poem was published in 1667, Eve had accumulated a great deal of credit for her connection to the earth, including while in the Garden of Eden growing and making food and The Rib Within

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choosing to leave Adam in order to best nurture the earth and its governance.15 Eve comes to be regarded as the one who produces change, not just because she leaves Paradise but because she is believed to have been always closer to the earth. She, more than Adam, crosses the threshold between Paradise and the natural world and becomes the first person to live with the consequences of the natural body.16 I argue that in Lelli’s cabinet, the female and male bodies are differentiated not only by gender but also by bodily matter, with the former fully embodied and the latter in the process of fragmentation. Not surprisingly, the state of embodiment is linked to the humoral body, a body inseparable from itself and mutable through the flows that work to balance opposing bodily fluids. The fragmentation of the body associated with the anatomical image, however, implies a process of separation within itself and a promise of reconstitution, challenging the concept of the humoral body by arguing for a structure that defined the relation between parts.17 Yet this consideration of the parts instead of the whole and its promise of perfection also brought new attention to the imperfect body long associated with the Fall of Adam and Eve. The humoral workings of the body are put on display in the Lelli’s cabinet of wax models through the conjunction of Eve and the female anatomical body, each raising aspects of the violence that produced the fate of the natural body. Even while detached from the cut through which anatomy activates the force of violence, the question of violence remains, and it is even more inextricably intertwined with the human body. While the male wax model in all stages of display is oriented toward a potential future perfection, the female wax model is oriented toward everyday life and death, produced by human intervention and the application of new technological and natural knowledge. The postlapsarian imperfect body came to attention in Protestant writings on women’s lives and family reproduction, just as it gained importance in medical texts.18 I propose that while the fragmented body divests itself of embodiment through violence to reveal the force and animation of the body’s structure, the natural body reveals violence within internal mechanisms that constantly confront pain, deterioration, and death. It initiates a sense of a self-aware modern body, but one that is quite apart from the idealizing tendencies of the fragmented body.

Differentiations In the seventeenth century, the creation of Eve was discussed more often than any other topic in Genesis with the exception of the Fall, and it was consistently differentiated from the creation of Adam.19 Eve is neither opposite nor secondary to Adam; rather, she is one who repeats the first but has difference within. William Austin, whose 1637 Haec Homo, Wherein the Excellency of the Creation of Woman Is Described became the source of many other accounts, wrote, “She hath not only the same name with him, but they are both of one figure, made by one workman; of one substance; in 162

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one place; in one day; so there is no general difference between them, that can give excuse to Man to esteem basely and meanly of her; since she was made so equal with him, and so like him, only with a particular difference.”20 Mieke Bal, in her insightful reading of Genesis, argues something similar, proposing that the biblical text of creation can be understood as a process of differentiation rather than as a sequence of stages. Bal insists that the biblical text itself does not warrant the misogynist interpretations of Eve that we have subsequently internalized, especially since these have become more fully fixed in modern societies, though the move to equality would presuppose the opposite. She unsettles the conventional interpretation of the biblical text but also adheres to it more closely. Philip Almond argues that the ideological imperative took priority over the hermeneutic process and that the original insubordination of Eve was consistently denied. Both agree that the biblical narrative works differently depending on the stage, and each stage does not necessarily imply all of those to come, up until the conclusion, which, for Bal, is the naming of Eve.21 Many early modern commentators argue for the perfection of Eve as God’s greatest achievement, and it is always her creation that both differentiates her from Adam and demonstrates her equality with or even superiority over him.22 For Austin, difference pertains initially to the material from which Eve was made: “For though as I said they were made both of one substance, which was originally earth, yet was her body made when it was more refined and purified. Adam was made of dust of red earth mingled with yellow said Josephus, which he holds to be the color of the true elementary Earth. But woman was made of a more noble substance, that cannot of it self properly be called earth, but only in respect of whence it was taken. Earth is dead and senseless but the matter of her creation was sensitive and living.”23 Eve comes into being through the manipulation of materials that are themselves imbued with life and sensation. What is suggestive about Austin’s account of creation is its focus on how Eve was made, the workman who made her, and the material used to make her. Eve’s superiority is attributable to the fact that she was made after Adam, when her maker had gained more skills and ingenuity: “She being thus made, is brought forth the last creature in time, as an epitome, conclusion, period, and full perfection both of heaven and earth . . . man in his own likeness the one male the other female, but the Woman last. . . . Every work being still more perfect than other, still ending in the most perfected of all, he rested.”24 We are told that the maker, God, needed to rest, for unlike his creation of Adam, in creating Eve he worked as hard as a surgeon, and had to put Adam to sleep and undertake the laborious task of removing bone from his body, and then had to experiment with the uncertainties of how to generate flesh from bone. The extracting of a rib is less common as a procedure than when God pulls Eve from the side of Adam, and when God works with the rib, it is always a much more creative act of making.25 It also entails the privileging of the accumulation of skills and knowledge, the daring nature of experimentation, and a sense that this achievement pertains to the future. The Rib Within

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The early modern differentiation between Adam and Eve bears an intriguing connection to the early concept of the anatomical wax model itself. The model, like Eve, is taken to be both a replication and a differentiation from the human body.26 Both start with human bone, which provides the support for the rest of the body. In Bologna, a skeletal bone structure was used to give shape and shore up the wax model. If Eve was differentiated from Adam through the use of stronger material—a rib bone instead of mud—the anatomical model was differentiated from the human body by the use of matter (wax) that was artificial but more durable than human flesh. While Eve was said to have benefited from God’s improved surgical skills, the anatomical model was conceived as experimental, entailing untried bodily preparations, new formulas for colored wax, and the development of technologies for cutting, casting, and layering both human and artificial matter. The wax anatomical model was to approximate, as much as possible, the lifelike appearance of the human body. Wax was already established as a material unrivalled in its ability to convey “a perfect likeness of the real thing” but also to convey a sense of presence and connection that did not necessarily rely on physical appearance.27 For instance, the healing effects of the wax ex-voto did not depend on the exact replication of the affected body part but rather on bodily contact and touch.28 According to a document in which Ercole Lelli requested access to the university’s anatomical books—especially Vesalius’s Epitome—a set of wax body parts was already in use for anatomical teaching in Bologna, and students practiced by touching the wax parts, much as the believer touched the ex-voto to produce the desired link to the divine.29 The malleability of wax served the study of the body’s tactility and mutability, but anatomical knowledge also demanded precision, and the wax body parts in the university had been damaged by being touched repeatedly and moved in and out of cluttered drawers. Lelli’s scheme for displaying the wax models permits both visual and tactile knowledge to emerge. In a drawing of the scheme presented to the Institute of Sciences, Lelli proposed a set of projecting wood and glass cases for the life-size figures that allowed multiple views from the front and sides.30 The cases were fitted with revolving pedestals, which expanded the number of possible views without the necessity of handling and touching. The shallow cabinets for the display of body parts, mostly muscles and joints, were to be studied as anatomical tables, frontally and close-up.31 But this privileging of sight did not dispel the importance given to touch in the study of anatomy and, by implication, to a body inseparable from the physical world. Dacome has shown that the cabinet was used regularly for anatomical teaching and that Lelli himself conducted demonstrations, usually opening the cabinets and displaying the models in the round.32 Debates continued as to whether wax models could replace actual bodies in the production of anatomical knowledge.33 They were regarded as an early type of human preparation thanks to their approximation of the human body, and certainly 164

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as better than the anatomy theater for students who needed to acquire observational skills.34 Anatomists used models as comparative material during dissections, enabling the observation of living matter that could not be seen in the duration of a single dissection. With the collaborative work of anatomist and wax maker, close visual observation of matter dominated over theoretical debates. The meticulous replication in wax of visual observation has become evident in corrections of finished models and the finding of organs and small glands not known at the time the models were made.35 Wax models—for instance, the series on the workings of the senses in Anna Morandi’s wax cabinet, kept at the Institute of Sciences from the 1750s—were also used to explore physiological knowledge.36 In Morandi’s case, the model depended less on the exact replication of the body and more on imaginative sculptural strategies to project the effects of the senses on the experience of physical embodiment. Dacome points out that the wax models were increasingly of interest to visitors to Bologna and were used to develop forms of observation in relation to various areas of study, especially natural philosophy, which was the focus of the Aldrovandi collection of botany and zoology, also housed in the Palazzo Poggi after 1742.37 Yet, the display of full-size nude figures of men and women was controversial, especially if the figures were not clearly situated within the moralizing roles of Adam and Eve. When Lelli requested payment for his wax models of male and female figures, he was refused on the grounds that their utility as scientific models was questionable.38 Indeed, his scheme was retained only after Count Aldrovandi, a supporter of Lelli at the Academy of Art, offered to pay for the statues on the condition that the display would then also be open to art students. In the 1742 document that outlines his agreement with the Institute of Sciences, Lelli takes up Vesalius’s description of the figures of Adam and Eve in the Epitome, in which the anatomist divides the entire surface of the body into four regions and identifies the parts found in those regions.39 Vesalius, who calls the figures “the nude forms of man and woman” rather than Adam and Eve, implies that the external view of the body is necessary for the purpose of guiding the dissection.40 Lelli changes things by stressing the importance of being able to read the interior through the legibility of the surface and to differentiate between man and woman: “A statue representing as in nature a nude man to demonstrate not only the symmetry of the human body but the different regions in such a way that they can be distinguished anatomically on the surface by the eye; in another statue similarly representing a woman in which we can distinguish and indicate anatomically the sites and parts differentiated from those of the man.”41 The two wax models, also identified as man and woman, are to be differentiated from the careful observation of the surface of the body. It is precisely the skill of visual discernment in the intersection between anatomical knowledge and artistic practice that is implied by Count Aldrovandi’s agreement to pay for the two wax models. And in this respect, the narrative of Adam and Eve itself proved particularly The Rib Within

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pertinent to the development of a comparative mode of observation. Images of Adam and Eve increasingly challenged observers to examine visual evidence in order to differentiate between the two, not only in relation to the eating of the apple but also in terms of the effects of original sin on the body. The representation of Adam and Eve frequently entailed the close scrutiny of human anatomy, and especially the assessment of the body’s internal physical and physiological condition from its external appearance. English diarist John Evelyn’s uncompromising critique of Jan Gossaert’s painting Adam and Eve (ca. 1520) demonstrates the results of such close observation (plate 22). In the 1668 preface to the translation of a French treatise on painting, Evelyn argues against painting that ignores decorum by introducing anachronistic elements.42 He is particularly adamant about “the painting of Gossaert (Malvogius) in His Majesties Gallery at Whitehall, who not only presents our first Parents with Navils upon their bellys, but has incorrectly placed an Artificial stone-Fountain carv’d with imagerys in the midst of his Paradise.”43 Evelyn was not alone in his critique of images in which the first man and woman were shown to have the external mark of a natural birth, but it is worth noting how his choice of painting opens up the crucial link between the body’s interiority and exteriority.44 Adam and Eve fill the full surface of Gossaert’s panel, their human scale and physical proximity defining the remarkable expanse of vision’s reach. The nude body offers a new form of knowledge by opening a continuous path, starting at the surface of the skin, which, no longer concealed by the God’s clothing of grace, opens a previously hidden terrain. In this instance, it is the body of Adam that is particularly accessible to the eye, revealing not only detailed musculature and inner bodily components but also transitory inner movements. In a recent examination of the painting with infrared reflectograms, the underdrawing revealed that Gossaert paid particular attention to the contouring and modeling of the stomach area of both figures, areas in which internal parts were defined very precisely with parallel hatching.45 The making of the painting, just like the making of the body, was produced from the inside out. Adam inserts his thumb beneath his raised tongue in a remarkable gesture that links his mouth to the apple diagonally across his body and that of Eve, who conceals the bitten apple behind her. With the arc of his bent arm, he draws attention to the intersection between the interior of the mouth, leading to the digestive tract, and the bite that has been taken out of the apple, leaving a deep bruise on its flesh. Pain emerges from disobedience, and it is located in the flesh. The unusual gesture, which according to the recent examination of the painting was changed to extend the penetration of the finger under the tongue, recalls the cannibal in de Bry’s Americae and its mocking repudiation of God’s dietary prohibition.46 In both instances, the gesture is informed by new theories of digestion that claimed that cold food, and thus the forbidden apple, had disrupted a prelapsarian body that did not have the digestive means 166

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to separate poisonous foods.47 Gossaert’s Adam and Eve is one of the earliest renderings of the Fall to draw attention to a link between the act of eating the apple and the kind of painful embodiment that would define the fallen bodies of Adam and Eve. In this attempt to extend vision across bodily boundaries, anatomy had artistic counterparts. Christian Kleinbub argues that Michelangelo, in his representation of the human body, projected interior experience onto internal physiological processes by mapping internal organs on the surface of the body. According to this argument, Michelangelo’s representation of bodily form was developed in close proximity to anatomical knowledge, but he did not pursue the fragmentation of the anatomical body, nor did he attempt to divest the body of metaphorical associations that brought spiritual and emotional depth to its physicality.48 In Lelli’s cabinet, one is invited to explore bodily formations through its substitute, the wax model, and, as I hope to show, to recognize that resemblance is not just a matter of physical appearance. The relation between the interior and exterior of the body was particularly pertinent to the female model, which, following theories of the humoral body, appears as indivisible but also as porous and open to the world at large. The humoral body was conceived as flow, with a complicated set of internal fluids constantly in motion, and always threatening the body’s well-being. Within this concept of the body, digestion was crucial to all of its workings, as digestion was believed to produce the humors, distribute nutrients, and affect the functioning of the entire system. Internal processes such as gastric indigestion were diagnosed through the person’s external appearance, especially changes in the color of skin and hair. The functioning of internal organs such as the stomach, liver, and kidneys increasingly came to the attention of medical treatment and theories of health.49 But humoral theories of the body also drew on a wide range of metaphorical supports, and the external world was no less implicated in its travails, exerting cosmic forces from the natural environment as well as from mythological and astrological systems.50 The flow, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, works as a succession of sensations rather than as the interaction between parts.51 Thus, unlike the fragmented body, which favored the supremacy of the structure, the humoral body depended on points of intensity at which change suddenly took place.52 Boiling or melting points and instances of opaqueness or transparency were conceived through the radical change brought on by the intensification of material rather than the balance between form and matter.53 Differences in intensity, according to Deleuze, mark out the limit of sensibility, which works within experience but also generates perception in the external world.54 This is in contrast to the fragmented body, in which transparency emerged through the discarding of unidentifiable matter in order to reveal the structure. Deleuze and Guattari propose that it is only when matter has been deterritorialized—detached from its original place—that it emerges in its smallest components (the microcosm, or what they call molecular) and brings forth forces ascribed to the largest entity, the cosmos.55 New concepts of materiality, The Rib Within

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especially within natural philosophy, attributed considerable intervention to matter itself through these circuits of flow. Drawing on models of alchemy and intensification, matter was conceived as always within process and creative transformation.56 The larger forces of nature were fully entangled with the disruption of digestion, which was regarded as a violent weapon brandished by the body against itself. Early modern accounts of bodily experience tended to locate pain within bodily flows. Vapors and stomach flux tended to be regarded as unpredictable flows as likely to bring pain as relief, while the threat of stagnation and interruption of the flow was most feared. The term violence was often used in descriptions by those who suffered from vapors and fluids. Violence was applied to the sensation of moving pain, and was even accompanied by imagery of physical torture.57 Between the humoral body and its substitute, the wax model, there was an undeniable resemblance, but not only in appearance. The materials used in anatomical imagery—wax, fat, pigment, bone—operated under similar processes as the humoral body: the boiling of bones and the melting of wax also depended on points of intensity. The male figures, and especially the dissected figures, produce performances that combine the display of materiality with the demonstration of material transformation. Lelli, in his ca. 1766 Self Portrait, appears carefully observing a version of such a male figure, which he executed early in his career in clay and reproduced in wood in Bologna’s anatomical theater (fig. 54).58 This écorché, adhering closely to Vesalius’s muscle figures and transposed from woodcut to clay, to wood, and to wax, in the form of the dissected models (plate 21), reveals how the opening of the body enabled the observation and grasp of internal details and structures rather than the illusion of the body’s presence.59 The dissected body displays its exertion not as a coherent representation, which is more the case with the figure of “Adam,” but through the use of actual human bone to build up the sculptural structure and show its negotiations with the muscles. Both bones and muscles can be distinguished, as can the spaces between them, through the contrast formed by the use of bleached white bone and wax mixed with deep red pigment. In the 1742 document, Lelli conflates the building up of the body through muscles with the making of the sculpture, with the physical properties of one presumed to depend on the other: “The sixth and last statue will show the muscles of the last order. Those that do not appear in the previous one and those that are adjacent to the bones, with the bones supporting in order to make the Statue more stable and resistant and to demonstrate more faithfully the insertions of the muscles.”60 The denuding performed by the four dissected figures brings visibility both to points of contact and to gaps between materials while demonstrating the sculptural construction of the model (plate 21). The statue, like the body, is produced out of synchronized movement, having detached itself from all coverings, whether clothing or bodily matter, that would prevent the demonstration of its mechanics. 168

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Figure 54. Ercole Lelli, Self Portrait, ca. 1766. Oil on canvas, 25 × 30 in. Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Courtesy of the Università di Bologna / Sistema Museale di Ateneo / Museo di Palazzo Poggi.

In the process of dissection, the wax model’s denuding departs from the écorché sculpture and hence from the model of antique sculpture. Even as the body is reduced to the final layers of muscle, it holds its form and increases its level of animation. While the muscles are distinctive in color and texture from the bones, they share the sculptural firmness that generates a desire to touch. Vision, however, is sufficient to observe its mechanistic complexity. Touch may encourage vision to keep searching for more, but the parts are discernible not only from the distinctive shape and movement of the muscles and bones, but also from the materials used in the making of the models—wax, bone, iron, paint pigment. In effect, they have separated themselves even more than the “Adam” has done from the coherence of the biological body; they approximate something that works more like an assemblage with parts that can be substituted and act separately. Yet in the case of the female wax model, the process of denuding offers an encounter that encourages the eye to contemplate the presence of a living body, which in its sense of presence is always, like the human body, implying its eminent absence. This is not to say that Eve’s body is distant or inert. On the contrary, this body’s state of transition is such that it suggests both the departure from the cabinet and the change from one bodily state to another. The female wax model evokes a state of embodiment that is less about the shape of the body and its components than about the experience of constant exchanges between flows and intensities (plate 23). The model gathers within itself the complicated effects of these exchanges, which are

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not simply internal, for they can be read through a changeable and vibrant complexion. The wax, with its translucent and transmuting layers, does not reveal the surface as a separate skin but rather as a continuity of flesh and blood within which bodily fluids and solids are intertwined. Some of the differences among the figures in the performance of denuding can be considered in relation to what is known about how the models were made. The wax models were produced in a workshop system, requiring exchanges between a wide range of people with different expertise, from artisans who worked with the internal structure, surgeons who acquired and prepared the human bones, and those who advised on the most recent anatomical research.61 Then came the work of the wax modelers, in which there could be substantial differences. Lelli is identified in documents as a “painter,” but descriptions suggest that he worked more like a sculptor, forming muscles with rough clay mixed with wax, mustard, and turpentine, and building body parts with ordinary materials such as hemp, which were used to shape muscles and sinews, and that he put these on the already prepared human skeleton, thus rebuilding the body from the inside out.62 In 1778, Carlo Pissarri wrote, “Lelli himself would mould the Muscles from said Skeletons, out of ordinary material, giving shape and size. Then he would have Manzolini cover them with coloured wax, imitating the real life appearance, giving all the necessary instructions; after this Ercole Lelli would add the finishing touches.”63 In a 1642 document, Lelli presents a list of expenses for making the wax models, revealing that aside from the iron supports and materials to bind the parts, two kinds of wax were used, one from the Levant and the less expensive sottana.64 The list includes generous amounts of pigment, especially carmine and ultramarine. For the most part, and certainly in the case of the two complete figures, the color wax work was carried out by Giovanni Manzolini, who worked on the project for most of its eight years of production. Like Pissarri’s, other accounts also attribute to Manzolini “the real life appearance.” Distinctions between the female and male figures have been noticed and attributed to gender and the convention of the muscular, agile male versus the rounded and sedate female.65 But this is not suggested by the discussions of the wax models, which keep to the similarities between the female and male bodies. Instead, it is about the kinds of bodies represented, which were produced with different wax techniques that subsequently have affected the long-term condition of material components. While the preparation and articulation of bones were widely discussed and different methods were published, the preparations of wax remained experimental and frequently secret, even though they required precision and knowledge of substances to obtain particular effects. Both fully fleshed figures are more fragile than the figures under dissection, as they do not include the internal bone armature, yet the female figure has a much more transparent and uneven surface than the dense and opaque male figure (plate 23). The layering of colored wax is finer and has remained porous and unstable and has marked the figure in all kinds of unexpected 170

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ways. The coloring of the wax was readjusted in relation to flesh and skin tones, producing a particularly effective “real life appearance.” As with other wax models, many of the substances used are known only from records of purchase, for example, bone or gold dust, and tiny shards rupture the surface of the female figure and make the skin surface highly uneven.66 In all the male figures, the surface layer of wax is thicker, and in the dissected figures the carmine color has caused the wax itself to become much more densely set, allowing for very little porousness and sense of depth. Instead, the shape of muscles and the verticality of their extension emerge more fully. What the documents imply and defenders of Manzolini claim is that his wax technique was superior to that of Lelli, whose experience was primarily as a sculptor, especially in stone and wood. According to the painter Luigi Crespi, Manzolini did most if not all the work on the figures; Crespi gave him credit for anatomical knowledge, which he linked to Manzolini’s ability to create a lifelike appearance in wax: “Manzolini, in making the sections of the cadavers, and opening them, and in search of the inner parts . . . alone was able to give Lelli the skill and scientific knowledge that he required, in the six statues, which adorn that chamber, of which two represent a man, and woman, as if they were alive. . . . The whole world can see and touch with their hand the skill, practice, and virtue of this work . . . with parts obtained from the actual body, expressed in wax, and as in life perfectly colored.”67 The ­partnership between Lelli and Manzolini did not end well; as Dacome has explained, the conflict between them outlived the two men and continued to split the Bolognese communities of anatomy and wax modeling.68 In its performance of the natural body, Lelli’s female model reveals a physicality that cannot be divided into parts. Yet in some respects, this is a body that discloses its nakedness more fully and moves toward a denuding beyond the skin, not only because it retains the memory of Eve at the moment of departure from the Garden of Eden but also because of the distinctiveness of its performance. Unlike the male figure and the dissected figures that reiterate its actions, the female is not performing the kind of movement generated by muscular force. Giorgio Agamben argues that the body exists as flesh when it is stripped of its movement as much as when it is stripped of its clothes. Thus the dissected models partly conceal their fragmentation by increasing the expressiveness of their movements. In this respect they also resemble Vesalius’s figures, although the dissected wax models offer a performance in which the parts become even more autonomous and less integrated than they are in the prints or in the more fully sculptural figure of Adam. For the female model, bodily movement is suggested by the gestures of the arms, although these too now seem to be momentarily stilled. The gesture of the right arm, held diagonally across the torso, certainly evokes Eve’s familiar gesture of concealment, the overdetermined sign of her unenviable destiny. But by now the gesture seems like a distant memory, more tender than anxious, more ambivalent The Rib Within

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than theatrical. The gesture brings a new purpose to touch, not as an attempt to deny the components and imperfections of the natural body, or to measure and classify its parts, but to activate an unexpected encounter. With this evocative gesture, our encounter is prolonged, our desire increased. The wax model emerges as a complicated and contradictory entity in Bologna. Lelli may have claimed that the display offered the most recent anatomical knowledge, but the scheme also draws on the narrative of the Fall, which turns out to offer an alternative to the Vesalian body by activating the transience and mortality of the body. Dacome argues that the scheme seeks to demonstrate that anatomical study could recover the loss of corporal perfection, especially through the different forms of knowledge on offer at the university. She points to Lelli’s pursuit of antique sculpture. During a trip to Rome, Lelli petitioned the university to acquire an extensive set of casts of antiquities that were installed in a room near the anatomy cabinet. Bologna’s thriving study of naturalia became entangled with antiquities, as fragmented sculpture brought attention to matter as mutable rather than inanimate.69 But, as Dacome also points out, Cardinal Prospero Lambertini, later pope Benedict XIV and the patron of the scheme, supported the study of anatomy because of his involvement in the trials of canonization, in which the testimony of anatomists became increasingly important in authenticating the sanctity of the body.70 Lambertini had already written that the sacred body should no longer be judged by its state of incorruption after death, as medical skepticism had made the imperfect natural state more visible but also more comprehensible in relation to the miraculous acts of healing that would now replace the requirement of bodily perfection.71 Lelli, following Vesalius, never refers to the two fully fleshed wax models as Adam and Eve. The attempt to separate the concept of the human body from the Adam and Eve narrative is already present in Vesalius’s treatise, although, as discussed in chapter 1, the image at the center of the Epitome is ambiguous: she covers her genitals, while he holds a skull. It is only when these images were reused, two years later in London, that the pair was fully returned to Adam and Eve: the skull of death is now between them, conjoining their narrative and revealing the twisting serpent encountered in Paradise. It may be that established expectations were so ingrained that a naked man and woman were always in some ways seen as Adam and Eve, or it may be purposeful: for instance, an attempt to reclaim the moralized Genesis narrative in view of the challenge from medical research. What the complicated intersection between Eve and wax model shows is that in Lelli’s cabinet it is not a question of deciding whether Adam and Eve or Man and Woman are on display; rather, it is the slippage between the two that counts. The man, like the figures displaying the workings of the muscles in Vesalius’s treatise, raises his arm and stretches upward, although a second glance might suggest that he is reaching for an apple from the high branch of a tree. From this perspective, the leaf at the woman’s feet recalls the fragment of the story in which Eve, having 172

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received the coverings of animal skin made by God, divests herself of the waistband of fig leaves that she had hastily put together. But the leaf has not been replaced by animal skin, and the hands that might be expected to cover her breasts and labia are still moving, unconcerned that her naked state might have moral implications. Out of sync in their performances as Adam and Eve, the man and woman are also separated as two anatomical concepts of the body. He has transitioned directly from God’s ideal in the Garden of Eden to the muscular, vigorous Vesalian body that seeks bodily perfection. She has retained the state of human embodiment of her biblical predecessor, but not in order to demonstrate its moral or physical decay.

The Memory of the First Departure Separation is always part of departure, and in the anatomy cabinet the imminent withdrawal of the wax model brings back the memory of another departure instigated by the search for knowledge. The departure from Paradise is most often represented, especially in visual formats, as one of loss and regret rather than in terms of the more positive view of the search for knowledge that early modern texts tend to stress. In this respect, Gossaert’s painting of Adam and Eve is also unusual, for it seems to link the departure to a change in self-awareness (plate 22). Exuding physical strength, Eve provides support and balance for Adam as she stands with her legs crossed, her hand clutching his shoulder. We seem to encounter the pair at a moment of introspection, not about their failure to comply with God’s prohibition but about what Agamben called the metaphysical transformation that became visible as “the nakedness of pure corporeality.”72 In Gossaert’s painting, as in Bologna’s anatomy cabinet, Adam and Eve seem to be at different stages in the recognition of their moment of transition. Eve exhibits not shame but empathy as she responds to Adam’s uncertainty. While Adam already wears the covering fashioned from leaves, Eve does not, as the tree stem still attached to the apple covers her, seemingly accidentally. Perhaps one notices how Adam and Eve are cut and split by crossing branches, unruly hair, and interconnected limbs. It would seem that the fragmented body has infiltrated the creation myth itself. One might propose that the fact that the figures of Adam and Eve have navels already removes them from the point of origin to one in which the coherence of the point of origin is merely a memory. As in the cabinet, Eve pauses at the threshold of change and faces outward to the limits of what the image can project. Behind her, the landscape seems vast, full of hidden riches that are nevertheless hard to access, as stones, trees, mountains, and rivers obscure any clear path. By 1600, Paradise had taken on geographical specificity and even featured in maps that situated it within a modernized biblical geography.73 Yet in the search for knowledge, cartographic directions were not enough; the first woman and man fill the full surface of their space and, with their arms around each other, frame the terrain of their future. If they were to turn to what lies behind, The Rib Within

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they would see that they have already become a memory of the first departure, and would recognize themselves as the figures on display in the fountain that marks that space. The fountain disrupts any clarity between Paradise and its outside, the past and the future. Scholars have pointed out that in his many images of Adam and Eve, Gossaert always represents the landscape behind Adam and Eve as a narrative space in which to locate the harsh consequences of the expulsion from Paradise.74 In Gossaert’s painting, the direction of departure is unclear, perhaps because it is marked not by a narrative path but by a fountain that represents the biblical pair already imbued with the full symbolic weight of their act of defiance. John Evelyn declares the fountain to be anachronistic, as the couple seem to exist as a memory of Paradise even before they have left it. But when regarded as an image within an image, as repetition with difference, it starts to produce a different orientation. Against the stability of the stone fountain, the instability of Adam and Eve’s mortal bodies is a poignant reminder of what is to come. In 1668, Evelyn was worried about the unity of time and space, but in 1520, a couple of years before the destruction of religious images in northern Europe, the worry was about the location of images and their power to mesmerize. The sculptures of Adam and Eve on the fountain take on the overall poses of Jan van Eyck’s Adam and Eve in the Ghent Altarpiece.75 The primary difference is scale, which in the altarpiece approximates life size and for this reason opened the figures to ­accusations of idolatry; in Gossaert’s painting, the two reappear reduced and simplified, retaining the surface appearance of elongated, smoothly shaped medieval sculpture, but now reversed. Indeed, they have become as empty as the painted flesh-and-blood figures have become full. The view of the idol is receding to the point of being difficult to bring fully into view unless one makes an effort, and the viewer becomes intrigued by the presence of a sculpture of the temptation of Adam and Eve before their departure from the Garden of Eden. Within a state of close and persistent observation, the statue is no longer an icon to worship but a tool with which to contemplate one’s own position in the world. The change of scale, medium, and presence suggests something left behind but still within memory, just as the biblical pair would remain present in European culture’s ontological enterprise as it redefined the limits of new knowledge. In Gossaert’s painting, the potential of the departure is not just within the landscape, which could open up countless possible activations, but also within the intersection of body and landscape. The two start to resemble each other: earth and stones become toes and nails, veins and muscles become tree roots, and human skin becomes tree bark. The bodies become landscapes that had to be traveled through experience as much as the rocky landscape that lies all around. The surface of the body opens up a horizon that seems vast but is punctured with obstacles and limits. It also provides the ground for the search for knowledge, through the act of denuding, which in the case of Adam and Eve is associated with moral implications and in the case of the anatomical figures of woman and man with bodily violence. Both, 174

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moreover, confront the limits brought forth by death. The horizon beckons, but, as Joseph Koerner reminds us, “Death is precisely the horizon of what a mortal person can experience as his or her life.”76 The grace of God may have previously covered the naked body, but it is only without that covering that human nature can be revealed and become known to itself.77 This is the condition that follows the first woman after she is given the name Eve, which, as Mieke Bal explains, invariably brought forth a performance of nakedness associated with shame and sin.78 If the intense encounter between the mesmerized observer and the living likeness of the wax model disrupts the model’s tendency to take on the identity of Eve, Eve’s association with nudity and the loss of grace ­continues to intrude in the moment of recognition. The gaze, as a lens imposed by cultural systems, has tended to heighten the visibility of the female body, starting with Eve, who even without an overt performance is much more exposed than Adam. By the end of the eighteenth century, the nakedness of Lelli’s female wax model had become unacceptable, especially owing to the visibility of the labia.79 As with most sculpture in papal collections, the wax model’s genitalia were covered with the leaf that initially lay—and now again lies—discarded on the ground. In a 1920s photograph from Julius von Schlosser’s article on wax portraiture, the leaf is attached to the body, changing the orientation of the gestures of both hands, which now seem to bring attention to this area of the body.80 Ironically, this is the act of censorship that returns the woman to the figure of Eve, and the display of natural human corporeality to an enactment of erotic denuding. Denuding entails recognition of loss and suffering. In Paradise, the nakedness of Adam and Eve was said to be a sign of their perfection. The Protestant preacher George Walker, writing in 1641, compared their skin favorably to that of other animals and found it sufficient in itself: Here they are said to be naked because they neither had nor needed any clothes, or covering of their bodies, which were all parts most comely and beautiful: Their skin was not rough, over-growne with haire like beasts, nor with feathers like birds, nor with hard scales like fishes; but their skin, faire, white and ruddie, was comely in itself, and beautiful to their own eyes, more than all ornaments of silke, fine linen, and all jewels of gold and silver, set with the most precious stones, and of most resplendent colour and brightnesse. And their bodies were of that excellent temper and constitution, that they neither felt any distemper of heat or cold. The air and all the elements were tempered according to the temper of their bodies.81

The loss of God’s grace is not simply about the loss of physical perfection but also about a changing relation to the natural world. Walker’s insistence on the distinction between the skin of Adam and Eve and that of other animals pertains to an inherent incompatibility between human embodiment and the natural world.82 The Rib Within

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For Agamben, this is the crucial part of Genesis, but one that is rarely represented, as it contradicts the assumption that the Fall is about the sudden experience of sin and shame rather than about the recognition of the human state. According to Genesis 3:21, God made tunics of animal skins for the pair to replace their flimsy coverings of leaves. In an extremely rare image of this biblical episode, a painting in the choir of the church of San Francisco in Quito represents God holding the skin tunic meant for Eve while confronting Adam, who is already dressed in animal skins and looks down with deep sadness (plate 24).83 Eve’s attitude is different. Still wearing her skirt of fig leaves, and even pinpointing the nature of her nudity by holding her hand over her labia, she stands a bit to the side, as if reluctant to join in the exchange between God and Adam. One might presume that she belongs in nature, as her covering resembles the trees that surround her, and that unlike Adam (and God), she confronts the natural world without shame or worry. She does not resist the skin tunics, but neither does she reach for them, presuming, perhaps, the sufficiency of her own constructed covering. In the cabinet, the female wax model’s attitude toward being naked is also ambivalent. She makes no effort to cover herself and ignores the leaf that lies on the ground at her feet, implying that the past continues in the present but that the present is not the same as the past. The male figure also evokes memories of having been in Eden, for his agile movements suggest both a state of perfection before the Fall and the reaching for the apple that ended that perfection. Both figures evoke the departure that must take place, but each performance of denuding implies a different correlation to the natural body and its orientation in the world. The four anatomical models in the process of dissection seem to continue Adam’s performance of denuding, although surpassing the legacy of nudity left by Adam and Eve by stripping the body’s coverings beyond the surface of the skin. Unlike Adam and Eve, who traditionally display discomfort with their vulnerable bodily state and seek to cover it, these wax models exhibit no such reservations, taking denuding to an extreme point and becoming driven by a frantic desire to remove every potential obstacle in the search for knowledge.

The Hidden Bone The female wax model is suddenly still, interrupted by the observer in her imminent departure. One arm hangs down with an open palm, while the other extends diagonally across the torso without any concern for concealing the naked body, as one might expect of Eve. Held just in front of the abdomen, this arm instead conceals the area of the belly button, calling to mind once again the question of her identity. One might be curious and look closely for the telltale sign of the lack that would identify the first woman, and one would find it not in relation to natural childbirth but in relation to creation outside nature, and within technological knowledge. Just above 176

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the waist of the figure on the right side, we notice a large indentation partly hidden under the stretched arm (plate 25). If no parts of the body seem separate from the whole before, this part now gains in visibility, perhaps because it has been kept from us. The very gesture that has made us wonder whether the figure is Eve now seems to confront us with a reminder that seeing is always contingent. The desire to touch reaches beyond our longing for presence and becomes a desire to assess the physical matter that makes up the body. The protruding shape under the arm emerges from the performance of denuding and suggests a reticence to reveal something different from the soft flesh and its iridescent tones. Observation only confirms that there is something within, an intrusion on the softest part of the flesh that has left behind the scarring of an old wound. According to many early modern accounts of the creation of Eve, Adam’s rib, the point of origin, must be concealed precisely because it is the most precious and sensitive part of the body. In William Austin’s account, the concealment of bone inside Eve is an indication of its value and its distribution in the cosmos: “Solid bones are compared to precious gemmes and hard metals and minerals which are the riches of the earth. And as these riches lie deep and hidden, and are not presently at hand; so these bones lie deep and round, enclosed in flesh. Of this rich and necessary part of man’s body was Woman composed. From whence may be observed that God made her not of what came next to hand, either of skin or flesh only; but pierced into the entrails and very bones for her.”84 The parallel between digging deep into the earth for precious stones and digging deep into the body of Adam for the best body part from which to make Eve returns us to the violence of defleshing bone, and the intricacy of this kind of anatomical procedure. Yet in the wax model, the visibility of the rib is initially thwarted because it is neither deep within (as is presumed to be the case with Adam) nor without (as in the dissected figures). The rib is not brought to visibility by its function—the animation of the body—and can only be detected from careful visual scrutiny of the soft flesh, which suddenly suggests all too vividly the pain of being “pierced into the entrails.” This pain impinges on Adam, but it is particularly experienced when it is located within the frailty of flesh and blood. Whether through the deterioration of the wax of the figure, or the attempt to bring into view the disruption to the surface, Eve’s wound recalls the pain of surgical imposition within the natural body. Vesalius acknowledges that this particular bone holds primacy among the rest: “it is the bone of all of these bones, or the spring of all the rest, and the most inflexible of all parts of the body.”85 If this rib is the starting point of Eve, for Vesalius it is also the starting point for the formation of the body’s structure as bone. By unleashing vertical movement, the rib bone becomes the means through which the body demonstrates its superiority and future potential. Austin writes, “Bones are the hardest part of the living creature for the establishing and upholding of the rest, so that the bones are as the frame and substance of the body, and the flesh but the plaster, The Rib Within

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cover or ornament. For whereas man of all other creatures hath bones that reared him upwards and sustain him; otherwise he might grovel on the ground, like beasts in the field or creep upon his belly like his enemy the serpent.” As Adam’s rib, the bone serves to distinguish man’s verticality from the nonhuman animal’s horizontality. Yet when transferred to the second creature made by God, the very insistence on the strength and uprightness of bone presented problems for those who sought to highlight the maker’s achievement in accommodating the bone. In keeping with the rib’s contradictions, Austin explains how the bendability of the rib is an indication of both its flexibility and strength and its vulnerability to physical violence: “a ribbe if it be gently handled is the most easily and farthest bent without breaking of all the bones, being indeed already naturally made a little compassing and bowing, but if it be violently struck or crushed it is soonest cracked.”86 In accounts of Eve’s creation, the rib’s flexibility is increasingly a factor in the procedure through which God transformed it into an entire body. The English physician Thomas Browne proposed that the creation of Eve demonstrated that the rib was a kind of blueprint in which all the information is contained for the building and maintaining of Eve. The idea of the blueprint emerges in attempts to link the rib’s physical properties to the qualities of Eve. Most agree that the rib was taken from Adam’s left side, which is said to bring Eve closer to the heart and emotions.87 Some Protestant accounts suggest that the hardness of this bone is a sign of Eve’s temper and determination, while others propose that some flesh must have been present so that she might be gentle and tender. The Anglican biblical scholar John Trapp thought Eve was created from Adam’s side so as not to be behind or in front, above or below, but by his side. Trapp suggested that the bone came from under the arm so as to remind man of the protection he owed the woman.88 Austin disagrees, writing, “the place of this body was the side, so called of lying secret or hidden. For it is situated under the arm which both hides and defends it.”89 The contradictions between anatomical and biblical knowledge proliferate in accounts of the making of Eve, but the two contexts continue to be intertwined. William Austin starts his arguments about the superiority of Eve by comparing the materials of clay and bone (Adam) to a potter shaping clay, and an architect designing and building an edifice (Eve).90 John Pettus challenges this interpretation, stating that while the Latin Bible uses the architectural notion of building, the English one uses the term made, “a word of lesser signification relating to the temperament of her body . . . nor had she the breath of life breathed into her nostrils’ as the life Eve had went with the bone.”91 Her breath of life was not produced through the divine power of God but through the skillful manipulation of human matter. But how was the rib taken out of Adam turned into a body? According to Austin, Eve “was made primarily of bone because flesh is the weaker and frailer part of Man and in the scripture for most part taken for the corrupt, sinful and unregenerate part, and God would not chiefly make her of that corruptible and contemptible matter.” But Austin 178

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cannot quite imagine that bone itself could generate life. Eve was made, he claims, of a bone “which is senseless of itself but of some of the adherent flesh also, which gave both life and sense to it.” Revealing his awareness of recent anatomical knowledge, Austin adds, “For in the word flesh is comprehended the sinews, veins arteries and muscles which convey the spirits of life, of animation and of sense, through the body.” For Austin, the spirits that produce life are still associated with flesh and embodiment rather than with bone. His account oscillates between anatomical knowledge and God’s supernatural power, but it is invariably flesh that retains bodily sensation and pain and thus proof of the living body. Austin says of Eve that “she was made from a bit of flesh but not of skin. For skin is so stretched over the body for a cover that it may without much pain be separated and drawn off from it.”92 The Protestant reformer Martin Luther, insinuating that creation involved the medical transplantation of body parts, argued fiercely that Adam was born with one extra rib, as God the surgeon would never have left him with a missing rib.93 Adam’s perfection seems to become a problem, and Vesalius ridicules the popular belief that men have one extra rib, the one paired with the rib extracted to create Eve, but he suggests that Adam might have had one fewer rib than most men.94 Pettus is less enthusiastic about using anatomical evidence to verify biblical creation, but still turns to it to define Eve as the natural body: The curiosity of Anatomists concerning our ribs is not to be a rule to our belief in the text; or whether we should dispute of the truth from the number of those which remain, for it is impossible to know what the original number was; Galen says 11, others 13, but now 12. . . . The question is as there are five called perfect ribs because they are circular and seven bastard or imperfect because they want that proportion, whether Eve was made of one of these which were perfect and circular or one imperfect, and by dividing perfection both became subject to imperfection.95

Which kind of rib was used to make Eve became an issue when the question of Eve’s superiority clashed with the argument that she was nonetheless human and thus imperfect. In the attempt to retain both possibilities, Eve’s imperfection was frequently associated with moral rather than physical failure.96 Austin argues for the crooked rib but justifies this by proposing that bones were gendered by the Fall and that Eve’s bones had to be bent in the form of a ship’s hull in order to have the capacity to bear children.97 The rib, concealed but ultimately revealed in the wax model, and amplified in interpretations of the making of Eve, offered the opportunity to further explore the role of bone as structure and the possibility of intervening through surgery in the structure. The creation of Eve became one of the two most discussed topics of Genesis and also changed the focus of creation from the power of God to the ability of the surgeon to produce new life.98 While God is the maker of both Adam and Eve, The Rib Within

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the creation of Eve alone required the skills of a surgeon and the ingenuity to deal with the problems presented by such an undertaking. God now becomes a craftsman or architect, but in both cases he is endowed with resourcefulness and inventiveness. Drawing on Genesis 2:21–22, the French theologian and reformer Jean Calvin contributed to the anatomical debate by suggesting that God put Adam to sleep in order to prevent him from experiencing pain. Thomas Browne regarded this as the first surgical procedure, while the French poet-lawyer Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas pictured God as a surgeon who removes necessary parts.99 The wax model is a mimetic duplicate of the natural world, but, as Deleuze argues, repetition, unless entirely simple and a stereotyped repetition, may conceal its own variability, and these elements may multiply on another.100 Eve’s remarkable resemblance to the natural body proves to be both a disguise, which suggests that she is a living presence, and a displacement, which suggests that the difference within multiplies is ultimately revealed. In the female wax model, the rib bone is both visible and invisible, but once it comes into full visibility, the performance of denuding changes. The unexpected intrusion of bone links the female model to the male models that have already stripped beyond skin and flesh. She too has bone within; she too has further secrets to reveal. The performance of the female model, which is as much about the interruption of departure as about its enactment, already exposes more as it lays bare the actualization of the natural body. The gesture of the arm reveals something hidden from view, but within a body that seems mutable and thus always in the process of change. Still, the consideration of how a rib could contribute to a body that is all about circulation and flow puts this body on par with that of the assemblage in the complexities of its mechanisms. The comparison brings recognition to further differences between the body as assemblage and the body as flesh and blood, although it simultaneously brings new attention to how the surgical insertion of bones brings Eve closer to the dissected wax models, just as this connection brings the muscles of the dissected wax models seem more like flesh and blood (plate 21). The use of deep carmine-colored wax to distinguish the muscles from the bleached bones suggests blood-drenched bodily tissue, admittedly contained within a smooth, firm surface.101 The attempts to marginalize the idea of flesh were, as I have argued, constantly disputed, as when Valverde explains that the muscles are formed within the flesh, or when Vesalius explains that some organs resemble flesh that is “denser and more resistant to injuries, having varying type of extremely robust fibers.”102 The synchronicity between bone and muscles might well suggest how flesh intersects with bone in the making of Eve, especially as it implies the assemblage of parts rather than the growth of one from the other. Yet the female model insists on embodiment through mixtures of flesh and blood rather than the covering of the all-important structure, as in the dissected figures. If the hidden bone is indeed the point of origin, it seems to propose a different process of embodiment. On the surface, both types of figures bear a remarkable resemblance to the living body, and even to Adam and Eve, but there is a significant difference. 180

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The Artificial Body Lelli’s anatomical scheme proposes a close relationship between the wax model and the human skeleton, which, inside the cabinet, is paired with the fully fleshed model, the latter to the left of the doorway, the former to the right (plate 19). Within the overall scheme, the bones and the framing skeletons are situated behind the table and opposite the figures under dissection, complying with Vesalius’s treatise, which considers the role of bones before starting the process of dissection. The section on bones includes the instruments deployed in anatomical work, suggesting that bones have a different status in anatomical study than the body of dissection. It is in effect a new creation and one that mediates between the natural body and the wax model. In the transformation of the skeleton into a kind of automaton through technological means, the early modern reconception of the creation of Eve proved crucial. The conundrum of how the human body could be made from a single rib, which became central to discussions of medical innovation and surgical skill, had as its counterpart the question of the number of human corpses needed to make an articulated skeleton. In instructions for articulating bones to make a skeleton, including those contained in Vesalius’s treatise, the concern with the acquisition of human bodies to be used in the making of the articulated skeleton moves beyond the lack of supplies.103 The worry and disgust about the initial removal of bodily matter to release the bones, entailing transporting, cutting, sawing, boiling, and defleshing, are palpable, as they brush too close to the imposition of violence on bodies no longer closely linked to criminality and punishment. Archival records do not fail to calculate, and perhaps exaggerate, the number of cadavers used; in the case of the Bologna models, the records indicate two hundred corpses for each model.104 One of Lelli’s conditions for making the wax models was the hiring of a surgeon to help him “with the necessary preparations and to remove from corpses the parts in the Hospitals as were needed depending on each figure.”105 For full-scale sculptures, support was provided not only by a metal rod but also by a full skeleton, built separately.106 If these figures continued to be regarded as articulated skeletons, it was because bone is always on the surface, and although the wax muscles act as coverings, it is the skeleton that serves as both structure and surface. Elizabeth Hallam has argued that the practice of articulating bones forged a close emotional relation between the articulated skeleton and its makers, and entailed extended periods of manual contact and shaping of bones. This process became a way to translate anatomical knowledge into material form and to conjoin the human and its re-creation. In effect, the making of the skeleton entailed the remaking of the human body from the parts of multiple corpses and using the process to explore and exceed human mobility. But the skeleton was not a secure unity, holding powerful yet contradictory components. Instead, it became something of a posthuman creature, which reconceives the human in relation to the nonhuman as both grown and made, and as always moving further toward artificial life.107 The Rib Within

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In Lelli’s anatomy cabinet, the rib—the hidden difference—turns the female wax model from a simple duplication of the humoral body into a body produced from surgery but also retaining the biblical figure’s proximity to nature. The hidden bone points to Eve’s state of embodiment as part of her surgical making, and by implication to the remaking of the body through the female wax model. Both full-size skeletons hold attributes of death: in the case of Adam’s counterpart, an enormous scythe, while in the case of Eve’s counterpart, a scythe that is upstaged by the realization that the skeleton mimics the arm gesture of Eve. In the preparatory drawing that Lelli presented to the Institute of Sciences, the cabinets for the skeletal figures are sequential with those of the two wax models, implying the end of the human body in death. But in the final arrangement, they were detached from the sequence by being resituated on the other side of the dissecting table together with other bones and the instruments of anatomical dissection. The skeleton that is paired with the female model still includes a mid-eighteenth-century label that insists on its being a “female skeleton.” It has been suggested that Lelli may have been interested in new debates about how gender differences were present in bones and not just in the reproductive organs.108 Dacome, however, points out that the first comprehensive description of the institute’s collection, by Giuseppe Gaetano Bolletti and published in 1751, referred to the female skeleton as demonstrating similarities between the sexes.109 In the case of the male figure, one can imagine that the skeleton is what lies inside, and indeed this is suggested by the performance of the figures in the process of dissection. It is also a familiar juxtaposition in anatomical frontispieces, not as life and death but as two interconnected aspects of animation. But in the case of the female model, denuding does not suggest that the articulated skeleton is what lies within the wax model or within Eve. In the wax model, bone and wax are one, a point best made by the fact that the layering of wax probably entailed the mixing of color pigment with ground human bone. It is precisely this unity that makes the sudden presence of the rib so surprising. In Eve, flesh grows from bone and bone becomes flesh, particularly in interpretations in which she is all corrupt flesh. But both Eve and the wax model share the same tantalizing gesture with the skeleton, a gesture that reasserts their connection but also, I would argue, their difference. As noted, the gesture both conceals and reveals the rib. Doubling the gesture with the skeleton is not simply a way to forge a before-and-after image but also an opportunity to compare the wax model and the articulated skeleton, which, conjoined, carry the memory of creation as a form of embodiment that retains the problems and opportunities of the natural body but is already the product of technological change. I have argued that the creation of Eve provided a crucial model for the making of the wax model, which would become the potential for artificial life. The intriguing inversion of the female wax model and its skeleton points to just this parallel. While, as the eighteenth-century label asserts, the skeleton is made entirely of human bones, with only the small hooks that join the bones together made of wax and 182

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metal, the wax model is mostly wax, with only the insinuation of a single bone. In effect, the production of the skeleton’s movement is linked to a technological conception of the bones’ joints, while the resemblance of the female wax model to the living body depends on wax’s ability to simulate an organic conception of embodiment and presence. In the first, parts are open to our observation as they are made to move in synchronized ways, but in the second there are no parts, only sedimentary layers that are uneven and produce an unpredictable form of embodiment. Yet the repetition of the gesture is important, as it insists on questioning the relation between human and artificial, presence and performance, one and its differentiation. With Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost, the early modern proliferation and elaboration of the Genesis account of creation came to an abrupt end.110 In anatomical literature, Adam and Eve might still appear as a familiar trope of the creation of the human body, but the parameters of this trope were no longer viable for the discussion of the human body, given the increasing accumulation of new knowledge. As Almond points out, the narrative was no longer a “catalyst for inquiry but grounds for skepticism.”111 But the increasing interest in the postlapsarian body, which was part of the focus on Genesis, changed notions of the natural body.112 Vesalius’s attempts to classify the body’s components and functions produced an assemblage of parts that marginalized experiential knowledge and idealized the body through the model of antique sculpture. These bodies are sometimes said to reach for the restoration of the body’s perfection, lost in the Fall, yet this is not suggested by Vesalius’s approach, which uses the textual account of dissection to present new research on the body and employs images to propose a transformative process generated through the violence of the practice itself.113 In the case of Lelli’s wax models, the tendency has been to regard these as somewhat anachronistic in their close adherence to both Vesalius’s idealized bodies and antique sculpture. Lelli writes that anatomy provided evidence of a “second nature” to amend nature’s faults, implying a blending over time of the natural body and its changes through technological intervention. The history of human embodiment is not singular, nor is it the exclusive prerogative of flesh and blood, as suggested in early modern ideas of the natural body.114 Embodiment as fragmentation, a familiar experience in our time of the posthuman, is a theme of Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina, in which the making of artificial life is imagined, once again, as the making of a new Eve (plate 26).115 Ava is constructed as a mixture of electronics and synthetics that simulate the appearance of the human body. While the limbs and torso are transparent and reveal the cables and tubes that enable circuits to flow through the body, the face and hands have a mimetic relation to the human body. Ava’s overall transparency resembles that of Lelli’s Eve, while the technological components resemble Vesalius’s abstract representation of the human system of the nerves. The face, however, reasserts itself in Ex Machina in ways that in Vesalius’s treatise would seem traditional. It is carefully cut around the facial features, recalling the cut in Zumbo’s head, though The Rib Within

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­ ithout the revelation of the latter that the face is no different from the rest of the w flesh. It is through contact with only the face that Ava’s artificial intelligence has been tested and assessed. When Ava, who seeks to escape the laboratory, finds a corridor into which earlier failed models are consigned, she recognizes her own face at the end of the sequence of faces hung on the walls. The android gains full embodiment as she takes parts from the discarded models inside cupboards and attaches them over her mechanical parts. Ava too needs many disused bodies to complete her actualization. The embodiment of fragmentation seems to demand the violence of discarded bodies. When Ava escapes, she enters a lush green forest, as if returning to Paradise, but it turns out to be a return to the world at large. As she yearns for knowledge about the self, she, like Eve, must leave perfection and enter the world. Eve, the holder of the human condition, is on the move in search of knowledge. It is owing to her presence in the cabinet that the continuity between nudity, dissection, and knowledge emerges. The dismantling of the natural human body as a performance of denuding reveals its imperfection, suffering, and pain just at the moment when intervention into the state of the body was increasingly the goal of medical research. If her state of imperfection permitted room for experimentation that suited medical research, it also troubled the human cost of dissection and experimentation. Eve resembles the anatomical wax model in that she stands for the mixture of components that negotiates between the human condition and the human desire to improve on it. The rib within Eve, the only part of her body that reveals itself as separate from the whole, is akin to the nucleus of bodily matter, which has within it the potential of all the rest, though not through simple duplication. As it turns out, the resemblance of Eve to Woman, much like the resemblance of the wax model to the human person, is not an end in itself but the means of rethinking the legacies of the human body and its imperfect destinies. In its state of embodiment, the female wax model turns out to be not only a site of remarkable human resemblance but also a placeholder for the future changes of anatomical knowledge. Mieke Bal suggests that the Eve of Genesis starts as bone but, with time, ends up being only the negative connotations of flesh. Seventeenth-century discussions of her creation, intent on reconsidering the possibilities of anatomical intervention on the body, are fully aware of this problem. I have argued that the fate of the imperfect natural body is its invisibility in the face of anatomical knowledge, while skeletal Eve, made responsible for the act that caused the body’s demise, retains the promise of artificial life associated with the articulated skeleton. Eve as the holder of embodiment, and as the figure that haunts the disdain that has long accompanied the human condition, is not yet gone; instead, she is always leaving.

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Notes Introduction 1. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 15. 2. Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 45–46. 3. Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” 155; see also Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 46. 4. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 34–63; Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 42–45; Weisser, Crime and Punishment, 130–32. 5. On the relationship between punishment and anatomy, see Carlino, Books of the Body, 92–98; Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy, 124–35. 6. Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, bk. 6, chap. 8, p. 584. This observation appears in the section on the buildup of fluids in the heart after death. Citations of De humani corporis fabrica (hereafter cited as the Fabrica)—not to be confused with Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica liborium epitome (known as the Epitome, also published in Basel in 1543)—are to the 1543 edition unless otherwise noted. 7. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 7–23. 8. On the public anatomy lesson, see Carlino, Books of the Body, 69–92; Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy, 16–54; Wilson, “William Harvey’s Prelectiones.” On the use of bodies in hospitals and public demonstrations, see De Renzi, “Medical Competence.” 9. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 72–75; Klestinec, “Civility, Comportment.” 10. Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 15; Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 36–37. 11. There are interesting overlaps here with René Girard’s notion of sacrifice ritual as a reenactment; see Girard, Violence and Sacrifice, 1–67. 12. Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 35–37, 39, 45–46. 13. Agamben, Nudities, 57–65, 80–82 (quotations on 81). 14. Landes, “‘Anatomy of Artificial Life.’”

15. Bredekamp, Lure of Antiquity, 14–19. 16. See Fleming, René Girard, 55–56. 17. Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 3–4, 13–19. According to Carlino, between 1506 and 1600, of the thirty-one bodies dissected, thirty died by hanging, and there was little relation between the type of crime and dissection. Books of the Body, 96–97. 18. Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 49. 19. Ibid., 47–51; Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 23–26. 20. Groebner, Defaced, 18; Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 49. 21. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 24–34. 22. Wittkower, Drawings of the Carracci, 153–54, cat. 411; Robertson and Whistler, Drawings by the Carracci, 65. 23. Carlino, Books of the Body, 103; Carlino, “Theatre of Cruelty and Forgiveness,” 163; Ferretti, “In Your Face,” 80–81; Edgerton, “Little-Known ‘Purpose of Art,’” 51; Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 142–43. 24. On methods of hanging, see Terpstra, “Theory into Practice,” 125–28. 25. Ganz, “Annibale’s Rome,” 244, cat. 76. 26. Malvasia, Life of the Carracci, 161–62. 27. Ganz, “Annibale’s Rome,” 204. 28. Bellori, Lives of the Modern Painters, 69–114. 29. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 245–61, 285 (quotation); on theories of film and the street, see the introduction by Miriam Hansen, vii. 30. Di Bella, “Observing Executions.” 31. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 72. 32. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 29–55. 33. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26. 34. Deleuze, Foucault, 28. 35. Carlino, Books of the Body, 94. 36. Gallonio, Instrumenti di martorio, 27. On the torture of the wheel, see Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel, 198–211. 37. Edgerton, Pictures of Punishment, 152– 55; Terpstra, “Theory into Practice,” 126.

38. Terpstra, “Theory into Practice,” 122–32. 39. On Jacques Callot’s Miseries of War, see Hornstein, “Just Violence.” 40. On the executioner, see Prosperi, Delitto e perdono, 353–68. 41. Weisz, Pittura e Misericordia, 5. 42. On the executioner and the ladder, see Edgerton, Pictures of Punishment, 185–91. 43. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 34–49; on punishment beyond death, see Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 52–61. 44. Montaigne, Diary, 128. See also Montaigne, “Of Cruelty,” 315. On Montaigne’s critique of torture, see Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 46. 45. Montaigne, “Of Cruelty,” 315; on Montaigne and postexecution mutilation, see Weisz, “Caritas/Controriforma,” 224–25. 46. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 49. 47. Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” 155. 48. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 57. 49. Holland was executed in Tyburn, England, on December 22, 1642. 50. See Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato; Weisz, Pittura e Misericordia; Carlino, Books of the Body, 98–117; Paglia, Morte confortata. 51. Piazza, Opere pie di Roma, 503–4. 52. Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, 100–101. 53. Carlino, Books of the Body, 104–17. 54. On the tavoletta, see ibid., 98–117; Edgerton, “Little-Known ‘Purpose of Art’”; Falvey, “Scaffold and Stage.” 55. Fanucci, Trattato di tutte l’opere, 336; Piazza, Opere pie di Roma, 503–4. 56. Weisz, Pittura e Misericordia, 63; Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, 100–101. 57. Ferretti, “In Your Face,” 83; Falvey, “Scaffold and Stage,” 17–19. 58. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 58. 59. Montaigne, Diary, 128–29. 60. Edgerton, “Little-Known ‘Purpose of

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Art,’” 48; Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, 96. 61. “Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” 274. 62. Edgerton, “Little-Known ‘Purpose of Art,’” 46–52. 63. This tavoletta appears in the inventory kept in the Archivio dell’Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, no. 296. In the “Inventario delle robe della Confraternita nel 1715,” fol. 20r, in Rome’s Archivio di Stato, thirteen tavolette are mentioned: “Due scattole grandi con dentro tredici tavolette dipinte.” Francesco Salviati’s workshop was employed at San Giovanni Decollato to decorate the church and oratory, and various tavolette were probably updated by the Flemish painters in the workshop. This tavoletta has recently been attributed to Giovanni Baglione. See Nicolaci, “Attività pittorica di Giovanni Baglione.” 64. On kissing images, see Feinberg, “Imagination All Compact,” 56; “Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” 275. 65. Edgerton, “Little-Known ‘Purpose of Art,’” 48. 66. Groebner, Defaced, 104. 67. Ibid., 51. 68. In its costume and multidirectional movement, this figure resembles the angel in Francesco Salviati’s Lamentation (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan). 69. Quoted in Edgerton, “Little-Known ‘Purpose of Art,’” 48. 70. “Bologna Comforters’ Manual,” 275. 71. Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, 16. 72. The uncertainty about when death occurs after hanging was a long-standing point of disagreement; see Mills, Suspended Animation, 25–27. 73. John the Baptist’s head on a platter is also on the façade of the hotel next door to San Giovanni Decollato; this hotel is the source of the confraternity’s income for its charitable work. 74. Carlino, Books of the Body, 94–95; Terpstra, “Theory into Practice,” 125–27. 75. Baert, “Johannesschussel as Andachtsbild,” 141–42. On this theological

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proposition, see Masciandaro, “Non Potest Hoc Corpus Decollari.” 76. Masciandaro, “Non Potest Hoc Corpus Decollari,” 20–24. 77. Baert, “Johannesschussel as Andachtsbild,” esp. 135–37. 78. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 13, p. 55. On the illustrated letters, see Lambert, “Initial Letters of the Anatomical Treatise”; Carlino, Books of the Body, 216–21. 79. In Rome, the university started anatomical research around 1531 and a chair of anatomy was appointed in 1552. Public dissections were done in the studium, a chapel that held religious services and was replaced in the second half of the seventeenth century by the anatomical theater in the Sapienza. Bartolomeo Eustachio became professor of anatomy at the Sapienza in 1549, and Realdo Colombo taught there from the early 1550s until his death in 1559. See Andretta, Roma medica, 403–6; Carlino, Books of the Body, 82, 92–98. 80. Carlino, Books of the Body, 104–16, 96–98. 81. De Renzi, “Medical Competence”; Carlino, Books of the Body, 92; Carlino, “Theatre of Cruelty and Forgiveness,” 157–58. 82. Carlino, Books of the Body, 96, 105. 83. Carlino, “Theatre of Cruelty and Forgiveness,” 160. 84. Carlino, Books of the Body, 49–50. 85. On the long-term use of Vesalius’s images, see Santing, “Andreas Vesalius’s De fabrica,” 64. 86. On the frontispiece, see Carlino, “The Book, the Body,” 43–45; Carlino, Books of the Body, 42–53; Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 200–204; Spielmann, Iconography of Andreas Vesalius, 124–43. 87. Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy, 45–68. 88. Carlino, Books of the Body, 40. 89. Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy, 6. 90. Ibid., 95–102. 91. Park, Secrets of Women, 207–21. 92. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 5, chap. 15, p. 539. 93. Ibid.; Park, Secrets of Women, 344–45. 94. Nancy, “Image and Violence,” 16. 95. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 2, chap. 7, p. 237 (misnumbered from 235).

96. Cunningham, Anatomist Anatomis’d, 23. 97. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 2, chap. 7, p. 237. 98. Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 480–81. 99. Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 19; Carlino, Books of the Body, 167; Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 37; French, Dissection and Vivisection; Shotwell, “Revival of Vivisection”; Guerrini and Bertoloni Meli, “Experimenting with Animals.” 100. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 7, chap. 19, p. 658. 101. Park, Secrets of Women, 215. 102. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 6, p. 560, second figure. 103. Vesalius, Fabric of the Human Body (Garrison and Hast trans.), bk. 6, chap. 8, p. 584. 104. Ibid. 105. Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 20–21. 106. Vesalius, Fabric of the Human Body (Garrison and Hast trans.), bk. 6, chap. 8, pp. 584–85. 107. Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 5, p. 561. 108. Baert, “Johannesschussel as Andachtsbild,” 143–48. 109. Groebner, Defaced, 11–12. 110. Hunter, Two Introductory Lectures, 112, quoted in Berkowitz, “Systems of Display,” 364–65. 111. Lindemann, Medicine and Society, 95. 112. Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 20. 113. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy. 114. Montaigne, “Of Cruelty,” 306–8; see Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 80. 115. Nancy, “Image and Violence,” 20–22 (quotation on 20). 116. Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 44–45.

Chapter 1 1. Harvey Cushing, an American pioneer of neurosurgery, suggested that this edition was issued when Girolamo Fabrizi d’Acquapendente became professor of anatomy at Padua and made the treatise required reading.

2. On Valegio and the 1604 frontispiece, see Spielmann, Iconography of Andreas Vesalius, 158–59. The 1568 Franceschi edition was published without an illustrated title page. 3. On the role of the frontispiece in anatomical books, including Vesalius’s, see Carlino, “The Book, the Body,” 50. 4. On the relation between part and whole in Vesalius, see Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 45–46. 5. These appear in the margins of Vesalius’s treatise: spine (p. 57), leg (p. 212), arm (p. 219) (as stated above, citations of Vesalius’s treatise are to the 1543 edition unless otherwise noted). 6. Recent studies of Vesalius’s treatise and its images include Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius”; Cunningham, Anatomical Renaissance, 88–142; Carlino, Books of the Body, 39–68; Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 198–248. 7. Landes, “‘Anatomy of Artificial Life.’” 8. Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 39, 45–46. 9. On this aspect of the 1604 frontispiece, see Spielmann, Iconography of Andreas Vesalius, 158–59, which links it to Realdo Colombo’s De re anatomica. 10. Della Croce’s 1573 Universal Surgery was published numerous times, and a new edition was being prepared in Venice in 1604, the same year as the fourth edition of Vesalius’s treatise. 11. The 1568 Franceschi edition used the original 1543 title. On the implications of the term anatomy, see Park, Secrets of Women, 16–18. 12. On responses to Vesalius’s treatise, see O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 181, 308–12; Saunders and O’Malley, Works of Andreas Vesalius, 30–31; Pantin, “Analogy and Difference.” 13. See Geminus, Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio. See also Larkey, Vesalian Compendium of Geminus; O’Malley, introduction to Geminus’s Compendiosa, 10–11; Donaldson, “Compendiosa of Thomas Geminus,” 180–82. 14. Donaldson, “Compendiosa of Thomas Geminus,” 181. On the Epitome, see L. R. Lind’s 1949 translation of Vesalius’s Epitome.

15. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 21; Donaldson, “Compendiosa of Thomas Geminus,” 182. 16. The Epitome from the Jesuit Collegio Romano is now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome. 17. On the publishers Lafreri and Salamanca, see Bowen and Imhof, Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations, 10–12. 18. Ibid., 67–84. 19. Vivae imagines partium corporis humani, unpaginated preface, quoted in ibid., 67. 20. O’Malley, introduction to Geminus’s Compendiosa, 9–10. 21. On Colombo, see Carlino, Books of the Body, 60–67; French, Dissection and Vivisection, 208–10. 22. Saunders and O’Malley, Works of Andreas Vesalius, 38–39. Vesalius’s disapproving letter was titled “Andreae Vesalii anatomicarum gabrielis fallopii observationum examen.” 23. Janson, “Titian’s Laocoön Caricature”; Carlino, Books of the Body, 51. On Vesalius’s relation to Galen, see Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 39–40. 24. Skaarup, Anatomy and Anatomists, 16, attributes this to a lack of knowledge of Valverde’s treatise; see also Carlino, Books of the Body, 53–54. 25. Colombo, “Letter to the Reader,” in De re anatomica; on Colombo’s claim, see Carlino, Books of the Body, 66–67. 26. On the frontispieces for Valverde’s treatise, see ibid., 53–58. 27. Spielmann, Iconography of Andreas Vesalius, 131–33; Carlino, Books of the Body, 55. 28. Carlino, Books of the Body, 54–55; Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 8, p. 81. 29. Examples include the 1634 English translation of Ambrose Paré’s Workes. 30. Vesalius, Fabrica, dedication, p. 2. 31. On Colombo and his title page, see Carlino, Books of the Body, 59–64. 32. Ibid., 64. 33. Ibid., 54; Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 474–78; Spielmann, Iconography of Andreas Vesalius, 130.

34. On bone in anatomical study, see Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 472–74. 35. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 14, p. 120. 36. On Vesalius’s technique for constructing the skeleton, see Wootton, Bad Medicine, 83–85. 37. Carlino, Books of the Body, 79. 38. Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 471–72. 39. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 4, p. 32. 40. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 3, p. 23. 41. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 1, p. 16. 42. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 1, p. 19. 43. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 1, p. 16. 44. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 2, p. 20. 45. Santing, “Andreas Vesalius’s De fabrica,” 63–64. 46. Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 215–17; see also O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 139. 47. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 3, pp. 23, 28–29. 48. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 3, p. 27. 49. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 4, p. 34; Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 473. 50. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 4, p. 32. 51. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 1, p. 1. 52. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 1, p. 18; Saunders and O’Malley, Works of Andreas Vesalius, 52–53. 53. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 1, p. 18. 54. Siraisi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity,” 81–85. 55. The only frontal view of the skull included in the treatise—a depiction of a human cranium and a canine skull—is also the only image that portrays the intersection of human and nonhuman body parts. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 8, p. 80; see also Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 222–27; Saunders and O’Malley, Works of Andreas Vesalius, 58. 56. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 2, p. 21; Saunders and O’Malley, Works of Andreas Vesalius, 54–55. 57. Vesalius, Fabrica; these appear in various chapters of book 1—see, for example, pp. 21, 22, 24, 39, 48. 58. On still life painting, see Marcaida and Pimentel, “Dead Nature or Still Lifes?” 59. Veca, Vanitas, 60–61.

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60. On vanitas painting and memento mori, see San Juan, “Turn of the Skull.” 61. Berger, Caterpillage, 12–18 (quotation on 15). 62. Damien Hirst chose Van der Schoor’s painting for his 2008 exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, which included his own work of a skull encrusted with diamonds. 63. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 167–91. 64. Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 118, 327–32. On bone and presence, see Hallam, “Articulating Bones.” 65. Kristeva, Severed Head, 10. 66. Krmpotich, Fontein, and Harries, “Substance of Bones.” 67. See Gordon and Marshall’s introduction to Place of the Dead, 1–16. 68. Kristeva, Black Sun, 105–38. 69. On Henri Bergson’s theory of duration, see Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 172–75. 70. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 9, p. 38, second figure; also pp. 22, 32, 48; Saunders and O’Malley, Works of Andreas Vesalius, 54–55, 58–59. 71. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 60, p. 164. The inscription on the plinth reads, “Genius lives on, all else is mortal”; see Saunders and O’Malley, Works of Andreas Vesalius, 86. 72. Cuir, Development of the Study of Anatomy, 84–86; Veca, Vanitas, 60–64. 73. Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 274–91, esp. 283–84. 74. Schupbach, Rembrandt’s “Anatomy of Dr. Tulp,” 32–40. 75. Wootton, Bad Medicine, 82. 76. Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 110. 77. Berger, Caterpillage, 13–14. 78. Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 473–77. 79. On functional aspects of Vesalius’s images, see Cuir, Development of the Study of Anatomy, 69–73. 80. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 170–72. 81. Carlino, Books of the Body, 47. 82. On the making of the articulated skeleton, see Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 478–84; Spielmann, Iconography of Andreas Vesalius, 130; Wootton, Bad Medicine, 84.

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83. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 2, pp. 146, 156, 159; Wootton, Bad Medicine, 83–85. 84. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 60, p. 165. 85. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 60, p. 105; Saunders and O’Malley, Works of Andreas Vesalius, 88–89 (for discussion of the problems of acquiring bones and how Vesalius introduced the technique of maceration, which is described in his book and which added parts from different bodies, see p. 88). 86. Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 47. 87. Landes, “‘Anatomy of Artificial Life,’” 98–103. On the automaton, see Bredekamp, Lure of Antiquity, 1–9, 74–75; Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines, 112–32. 88. Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 468, 480–81; Wootton, Bad Medicine, 82–86. 89. Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 474. 90. Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 47–49. 91. Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 473. 92. Vesalius, Epitome, xxii–xxvi; Saunders and O’Malley, Works of Andreas Vesalius, 38–39; Mathes, “As Long as a Swan’s Neck,” 112–13. 93. Vesalius, Epitome, 90. 94. Ibid., 94. 95. Crowther, Adam and Eve, 92–96. 96. See the original 1545 edition of Geminus’s Compendiosa in the British Library, London, C70.1.2, 20–21. 97. Voragine, Golden Legend, 337. 98. Montesano, “Adam’s Skull,” esp. 26. 99. Voragine, Golden Legend, 269–70. 100. For example, Lucas Kilian’s much reprinted engraving of Eve from the set of three broadsides Catoptri microcosmici published by Stephan Michelspacher in 1613 in Augsburg. 101. On Adam and the skull, see Montesano, “Adam’s Skull.” 102. Formigari, Language and Experience, 11, 5–7. 103. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 13, pp. 113–14.

Chapter 2 1. Valverde, Historia de la composición, dedication to Ioan de Toledo, the cardinal archbishop of Santiago, September 13, 1554,

fol. iir. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2. Ibid., preface to bk. 1, fol. 2v. 3. Siraisi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity”; Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 32–35. 4. Valverde, Historia de la composición, fol. 2v. 5. Ibid., fols. 2v–3r. 6. Klestinec, “Juan Valverde de (H) Amusco,” 83–87. 7. Valverde, Anatomia del corpo humano (1560), dedication to Philip II, dated May 20, 1559. 8. Klestinec, “Juan Valverde de (H) Amusco,” esp. 90; on Vesalius and Galen, see Siraisi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity,” 64. 9. Valverde, Historia de la composición, fol. iir–v. 10. Ibid., preface to the reader, fol. iiir. 11. Ibid. 12. Olry and Motomiya, “Baroque Anatomy Masterpieces.” 13. See Bohde, “Skin and the Search for the Interior,” 25, 33–34; Nadalo, “Armed with Scalpel and Cuirass.” 14. On the material versus the transparent formation of these images, see Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 1–3. 15. Roth, Irresistible Decay, 2. 16. Wiegand, “Marginal Notes.” 17. Valverde, Historia de la composición, bk. 2, first plate. 18. Ibid., dedication, fol. iiv. 19. Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 49. Harcourt argues that this device puts distance between the anatomist and this violation. 20. Schupbach, Rembrandt’s “Anatomy of Dr. Tulp,” 17; on the hand as an instrument of human intelligence, see O’Rourke Boyle, Senses of Touch, 24–76; Harvey, “Touching Organ,” 88–90; Rowe, “God’s Handy Worke.” 21. Schupbach, Rembrandt’s “Anatomy of Dr. Tulp,” 17. 22. The first Italian edition of Valverde’s treatise was titled Anatomia del corpo humano (Rome: Salamanca & Lafreri, 1560); editions were published in Venice by the Stamperia de Giunti in 1586, 1589, 1606, 1607, and 1636.

23. See Zorah, Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome; Parshall, “Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum.” 24. Beatrizet, from Lorraine, worked in Rome 1540–65. Bury, “Beatrizet and the ‘Reproduction’”; Carlino, Books of the Body, 54. 25. Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 34. 26. Klestinec, “Juan Valverde de (H) Amusco,” 78. 27. Saunders and O’Malley, Works of Andreas Vesalius, 38. 28. For recent work on Valverde’s treatise in Spain, see Skaarup, Anatomy and Anatomists, 9–29. 29. Klestinec, “Juan Valverde de (H) Amusco,” 80–82, 89. 30. Ibid., 93–94; see also Chartier, “Foucault’s Chiasmus.” 31. Klestinec, “Juan Valverde de (H) Amusco,” 91, 92. 32. Santing, “Andreas Vesalius’s De fabrica,” 66–67. 33. On the restoration of antiquities, see Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 173–207; Brilliant, My Laocoön, 29–30; Koortbojian, “Pliny’s Laocoön?” 34. Barkan, “Beholder’s Tale,” 136–38. 35. Parshall, “Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum.” 36. Barkan, “Beholder’s Tale,” 133–34. 37. Bredekamp, Lure of Antiquity, 11–19; Richter, Laocoön’s Body, 16. 38. Bredekamp, Lure of Antiquity, 14–19, 11. 39. Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 189–203. 40. Gross, Dream of the Moving Statue, 18–19. 41. Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 42. 42. Ibid., 49. 43. Bohde, “Skin and the Search for the Interior,” 25–26. 44. Valverde, Historia de la composición, bk. 2, chap. 2, fol. 30r–v. 45. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 2, fol. 29v. 46. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 2, fol. 30r. 47. Szladitz, “Influence of Michelangelo,” 420. 48. Bohde, “Skin and the Search for the Interior,” 14–16. 49. Ibid., 22–25. The transparency of flesh

was not only a theological issue, as the X-ray was already imagined in the seventeenth century—for instance, in the Spanish anatomist Martinez’s engravings of the body. See Cafagna, “Corpi trasparenti da Martínez a Mann.” 50. This strategy is also used in Geminus’s Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio. 51. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 4, pp. 39–40. 52. On early modern natural knowledge, see Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 45–47; Johns, Nature of the Book, 1–44. 53. Agamben, Nudities, 55–90 (quotation on 59). 54. Valverde, Historia de la composición, bk. 2, chap. 2, fols. 29v–30r. 55. Ibid., bk. 3, chap. 1, fol. 60v. 56. On these engravings, see Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 49–50. 57. Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 191–92. 58. Valverde, Historia de la composición, bk. 3, chap. 1, fol. 60v. 59. Ibid., bk. 3, chap. 3, fol. 61r–v. 60. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3. 61. Valverde calls this the “Redaño,” which in modern medicine is called the mesentery. 62. Valverde, Historia de la composición, bk. 3, chap. 6, fol. 63r. 63. Kliot and Kliot, Needle-Made Lace of Reticella. 64. Valverde, Historia de la composición, bk. 3, chap. 14, fol. 68r. 65. Agamben, Nudities, 62. 66. Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 49–52. 67. On the Laocoön, see Loh, “Outscreaming the Laocoön”; Brilliant, My Laocoön; Koortbojian, “Pliny’s Laocoön?”; Richter, Laocoon’s Body. 68. Richter, Laocoon’s Body, 16. 69. Richter attributes to Lessing the consolidation of this already established approach. Ibid., 32. 70. Loh, “Outscreaming the Laocoön,” 403–4. 71. Janson, “Titian’s Laocoön Caricature.” 72. Valverde, Historia de la composición, bk. 2, chap. 2, fols. 29v–30v.

73. On analogy in vivisection, see Shotwell, “Revival of Vivisection.” 74. Vesalius, Fabric of the Human Body (Garrison and Hast trans.), bk. 7, chap. 19, p. 661. 75. Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 37–38. 76. Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 19–21. 77. For the corresponding image in Vesalius, see Fabrica, bk. 5, twelfth figure, pp. 360–64. See also Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 61n60; Nadalo, “Armed with Scalpel and Cuirass.” 78. Aldrovandi, Antichità de la città di Roma, 72. 79. On the history of the trophies, see Grisanti, “Trofei di Mario”; Picard, Trophées romain, 350–524. 80. Grisanti, “Trofei di Mario,” 52–55. 81. On trophies and their associated practices and meanings, see Picard, Trophées romains, 16–133. 82. I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s argument about the sacred being both within and outside the law; see Homo Sacer, 91–99. 83. In the 1545 edition of Geminus’s Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio (13), the two figures appear next to each other, also surrounded by the many views of the unfolding heart. 84. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 6, second figure, p. 561. 85. Valverde, Historia de la composición, bk. 4, first figure, index of letters. 86. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 6, chap. 1, pp. 568–70. 87. Sugg, Murder After Death, 42–45.

Chapter 3 1. Theodor de Bry’s third volume on the Americas (Americae tertia pars: Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae) starts with the image of Adam and Eve opposite the preface to the reader. The image reappears at the start of other sections in the volume. On de Bry’s publishing project on the Americas, see Davies, Renaissance Ethnography, 257–96. 2. Tupinamba is the name adopted by communities that live along the coast of Brazil from São Paulo to the mouth of the

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Amazon. See Monteiro, “Crisis and Transformations.” 3. On cannibalism, see Lestringnant, Cannibals; Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism; Davies, Renaissance Ethnography, 65–108; Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires, 113–34; Guest, Eating Their Words, 1–9. 4. Martel, “Hans Staden’s Captive Soul,” 51. 5. Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 2–10. 6. Purnis, “Digestive Tracts,” 167–71; Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 47–50. 7. Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 243–53, 3 (quotation). 8. This image follows the sequence of images on cannibalism in book 9 of de Bry’s Americae tertia pars. All citations of this work are to the copy in the British Library, c115.h.2. 9. On the cannibal performance, see Whitehead and Harbsmeier’s introduction to Hans Staden, True History, lxi–lxvii. 10. On Staden as captive, see ibid., lxviii; Martel, “Hans Staden’s Captive Soul,” 58–64. 11. Whitehead and Harbsmeier, introduction to Staden, True History, lxviii. 12. See, for example, Bronzino’s The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence in Santa Croce, Florence. Bynum and Gerson, “Body-Part Reliquaries.” 13. On resemblance, see Foucault, Order of Things, 17–25. 14. Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” 155. 15. De Certeau, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals,’” 70–73. 16. Léry, History of a Voyage, 132–33. 17. Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” 155. 18. Whitehead and Harbsmeier, introduction to Staden, True History, lvi; on the significance of cannibalism for Europeans, see pp. lxiii–lxx. 19. Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires, 113–34. 20. Kalil, “Espanhóis canibais,” 279–82. 21. Gaudio, Engraving the Savage, 16–23. 22. Park, “Nature in Person,” 56–62, 64. 23. Agamben, Nudities, 55–90. 24. Léry, History of a Voyage, 126, 244;

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Whitehead and Harbsmeier, introduction to Staden, True History, lxxviii. 25. Fleming, “Renaissance Tattoo,” 64, 71–77. According to Fleming, de Bry’s engravers were unable to distinguish between body paint and tattooing. 26. Léry, History of a Voyage, 56–68. 27. Rountree, “Mapping the Protestant Experience,” 2, 4–5. 28. Léry, History of a Voyage, 67–68. 29. Rubiés, “Texts, Images, and the Perception”; Schreffler, “Pictorial Rhetoric of Cannibalism.” 30. Whitehead and Harbsmeier, introduction to Staden, True History, lxxiv– lxxxiii. On the relationship between Staden’s and de Bry’s prints, see pp. lxxvii–lxxx. On de Bry’s sources, see Keazor, “Theodore De Bry’s Images”; Pratt, “Truth and Artifice.” 31. Gaudio, Engraving the Savage, 1–9; Keazor, “Theodore De Bry’s Images”; Kalil, “Espanhóis canibais.” 32. Rubiés, “Texts, Images, and the Perception,” 120–25. 33. Purnis, “Digestive Tracts,” 87–93; Guggenheim, “Paracelsus and the Science of Nutrition,” 1190–91. 34. Crowther, Adam and Eve, 74–88. 35. Guggenheim, “Paracelsus and the Science of Nutrition.” On Renaissance views of the digestion of fruit, see Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy, 212. 36. Guggenheim, “Paracelsus and the Science of Nutrition,” 1192. 37. Classen, Color of Angels, 24. On Robert Burton and fruit, see Farabee, “‘Knowledge Is as Food,’” 158. 38. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 131–68, esp. 150–52; Farabee, “‘Knowledge Is as Food,’” 154–56. 39. Tigner, “Eating with Eve”; McColley, Gust for Paradise, 159–64; Musacchio, Milton’s Adam and Eve, 125–43. 40. Elias, Civilizing Process, 365–69. 41. Purnis, “Digestive Tracts,” 170–72. 42. Avramescu, Intellectual History of Cannibalism, 9. 43. See Dryander’s preface to Staden’s True History, 9–16. On Dryander’s participation,

see Whitehead and Harbsmeier’s introduction, pp. xvii–xviii and nn154–56, 168–69. Dryander also wrote the preface to de Bry’s Americae tertia pars. 44. Martel, “Hans Staden’s Captive Soul,” 62–64; Staden, True History, 61. 45. On Portuguese and French travel accounts to Brazil and the complicated alliances of their authors, see Whitehead and Harbsmeier’s introduction to Staden, True History, xxii–lxi. 46. Ibid., lix; Martel, “Hans Staden’s Captive Soul,” 58–60. 47. Park, “Nature in Person,” 71. 48. Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires, 4–8. 49. Whitehead and Harbsmeier, introduction to Staden, True History, lix. 50. Ibid., lxiii. 51. The voice of the cannibal returned in the 1950s in Brazilian modernism, and more recently as anticolonial revenge. See Martel, “Hans Staden’s Captive Soul,” 53. 52. The title page appears as the frontispiece of the entire section on Brazil and again on p. 135. 53. Staden, True History, 119–21; Léry, History of a Voyage, 128. 54. Léry, History of a Voyage, 128. 55. Léry, History of a Voyage, 118, 123–25 (quotation on 125). 56. Ibid., 127. 57. Staden, True History, 80–81 (quotation on 81). 58. Léry, History of a Voyage, 127. 59. Staden, True History, 116. 60. On the female cannibal, see Staden, True History, 93–116; Léry, History of a Voyage, 126. 61. Compare Staden, True History, fig. 53. 62. Ibid., 121. 63. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 5, p. 455. 64. For the image, see Baadj, “World of Materials,” 211, fig. 5. 65. Ripa, Iconologia, 353. Another example is the frontispiece of Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1570. See Tokumitsu, “Migrating Cannibal,” 100–101. 66. Mulcahy, “Arte religioso y su function.” 67. Huisman, Finger of God, 50–59.

68. San Juan, Vertiginous Mirrors, 27–28. 69. Ibid., 10–23, 197–222. 70. Torsellino, Admirable Life of Francis Xavier, 465. 71. Ceballos, “Pinturas de la vida.” 72. San Juan, Vertiginous Mirrors, 20–22. 73. Ceballos, “Pinturas de la vida,” 96–97. 74. On the chapel in Il Gesu, see San Juan, Vertiginous Mirrors, 198–202. 75. Osswald, “Society of Jesus,” 604; Castelnau-L’Estoile, “Partage des reliques,” 753–57. 76. Bressani’s map, titled “Nuova Francia acurata delineatio,” is held in the Canadian National Archive in Ottawa. For more on this map, see San Juan, Vertiginous Mirrors, 23–26. 77. This engraved inset is printed separately from the rest of the map, which is itself divided into two plates. 78. Léry, History of a Voyage, 126. 79. Hulme, “Introduction: The Cannibal Scene,” 2–3. See also Whitehead and Harbsmeier’s introduction to Staden, True History, lviii–lix. 80. San Juan, Vertiginous Mirrors, 207–9. 81. Mulcahy, “Arte religioso y su function.” 82. For example, the altarpiece in the Chapel of the Crucifix, Sant’Ignazio, Rome. 83. Staden, True History, 54, 136. 84. Cohen, “Meaning of the Head,” 63. 85. Léry, History of a Voyage, 122–33 (quotation on 127). 86. Martel, “Hans Staden’s Captive Soul,” 54–55, 63–64. On auto-ethnography, see Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone.” 87. Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust, 28–35. 88. Geary, Furta Sacra. 89. Karnal, “Reliques dans la conquête,” 749–50; Castelnau-L’Estoile, “Partage des reliques.” 90. Karnal, “Reliques dans la conquête,” 733–35; Castelnau-L’Estoile, “Partage des reliques,” 755. 91. Castelnau-L’Estoile, “Partage des reliques,” 758–68, esp. 765, 768, and 753. 92. Columbus named the Virgin Islands in 1493 on his second voyage; in 1520, Ferdinand Magellan named Cape Horn “Cabo de las 11,000 Virgines,” and João

Álvares Fagundes named the group of islands off the south coast of Newfoundland “Las Once mil Virgenes.” See Johnson, Phantom Islands of the Atlantic, 199; Montgomery, St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand, 40–41. 93. Montgomery, St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand, 99–115. 94. Ibid., 19–20. 95. Ibid., 26. On the trade of Saint Ursula’s relics in the Reformation, see Hendrix, Martin Luther, 59. 96. Osswald, “Society of Jesus,” 603; Castelnau-L’Estoile, “Partage des reliques,” 754–55. 97. On the authenticity of the skulls allegedly belonging to the virgins, see Castelnau-L’Estoile, “Partage des reliques,” 754. 98. San Juan, Vertiginous Mirrors, 125–56. 99. Ibid., 141–43; Belting, Likeness and Presence, 64–69; Noreen, “Icon of Santa Maria Maggiore.” 100. Nieremberg, Ideas de virtud, 248. 101. Cabral, Relazione della vita, 164–68. 102. Léry, History of a Voyage, 132. 103. Beauvais, Lives of St. Peter, 369. According to Beauvais’s 1744 French edition of the life of Azevedo, the image eventually found its way to Brazil, in particular to the Novitiate of Coimbra, where it was prodigious because it was immersed in both martyr’s blood and seawater. 104. Castelnau-L’Estoile, “Partage des reliques,” 755. 105. On the Jesuits and the cult of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, see Osswald, “Society of Jesus.” 106. Montgomery, St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand, 165–71, 117–36. See also St. Albans Chronicle, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 6, fol. 34r. 107. Quoted in Karnal, “Reliques dans la conquête,” 754. 108. Osswald, “Society of Jesus,” 606. 109. Karnal, “Reliques dans la conquête,” 735. 110. On Léry’s memory of Tupinamba sounds, see de Certeau, “Ethno-Graphy.” 111. Bynum, Christian Materiality, 17–22, 71–79.

112. Castelnau-L’Estoile, “Reliques des reliques,” 756. 113. Ibid., 755. 114. Osswald, “Society of Jesus,” 604–5. 115. Montgomery, St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand, 4. On body-part reliquaries, see Bynum and Gerson, “Body-Part Reliquaries.” 116. Baert, “Johannesschussel as Andachtsbild,” 145–48.

Chapter 4 1. Cohen, “Meaning of the Head,” esp. 63–64. 2. Scatliff and Johnson, “Andreas Vesalius and Thomas Willis,” 19. 3. On the anatomical wax model, see Maerker, Model Experts; Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 1–23. 4. Ludovico Cigoli’s small écorché figure (ca. 1600), both in wax and in bronze, is regarded as the first wax model. See Laurenza, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy, 34–35. 5. Zumbo’s model was at the Gallery of the Grand Duke de’ Medici by 1700, the year Zumbo left for France. There is no evidence for the argument that it was made for Cosimo de’ Medici. When, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was sold upon the departure of the Medici heir for Vienna, it was assessed by members of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence; the assessment document was made known to me by Professor Bellisi on behalf of the Accademia di Belle Arti. Azzaroli, “Specola”; Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 83–85. 6. Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 83. 7. Puccetti, “Modelli anatomia del XVII secolo,” 43–46. 8. Gross, Dream of the Moving Statue, 15. 9. Gross argues that the moving statue conveys the idea of arrested life. Ibid., 15–19 (quotation on 19). 10. Carlino, Books of the Body, 213–25; Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius,” 35–37. 11. Puccetti, “Modelli anatomia del XVII secolo.” 12. Sanguineti, “Ceroplastica a Genova,” 15–17; Legée, “Injections anatomiques.”

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13. On Desnoues, see Lightbown, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo—II,” 563; Puccetti, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo,” 22–23; Cagnetta, “Vie et l’ouvre,” 494–95. 14. The letter was published in Rome in the Jesuit journal Memorie di Trevoux. In October 1707, the same journal published Antonino Mongitore’s “Memorie dei pittori, scultori, architetti, artefici in cera siciliani,” which includes an entry for Gaetano Zumbo in which Mongitore defends Zumbo from Desnoues’s claims on the grounds that his work was so admired that it spawned jealousy. Mongitore’s text and the letters appear in Giansiracusa, Scritti sull’opera di Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, 51–57. On the controversy, see Lightbown, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo—I,” 486–89. On controversy surrounding wax recipes, see Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 70. 15. Giansiracusa, Scritti sull’opera di Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, 52. 16. On anatomical preparations, see Puccetti, “Modelli anatomia del XVII secolo.” 17. Giansiracusa, Scritti sull’opera di Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, 53. 18. Azzaroli, “Specola,” 16–18. 19. Giansiracusa, Scritti sull’opera di Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, 54. 20. Puccetti, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo,” 22. 21. On the anatomical head, see Puccetti, “Modelli anatomia del XVII secolo,” 47–52; Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 81–84. 22. On Zumbo’s life and career, see Lightbown, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo—I” and “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo—II”; Cagnetta, “Vie et l’ouvre”; Puccetti, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo”; Giansiracusa, Scritti sull’opera di Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, 13–35; and Azzaroli, “Specola,” 19–20. 23. These “theatri” are regarded as a type of memento mori and are associated with the outbreak of the Plague in Naples in 1656–57. See Calvi, “Zummo e la Peste”; Giansiracusa, Vanitas vanitatum, 17–27; Azzaroli, “Specola,” 19–20. 24. Cagnetta, “Vie et l’ouvre,” 499. 25. This text was found by Elvira Natoli in 1977, inserted in the same journal in which

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the accusatory correspondence on Zumbo was published. Giansiracusa, Scritti sull’opera di Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, 53. 26. Harvey, “Touching Organ,” 96–102. 27. On Zumbo’s religious and portraiture wax works and techniques, see Sanguineti, “Ceroplastica a Genova,” 15–17; Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 83–84; Puccetti, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo,” 21–22. 28. Schlosser, “History of Portraiture in Wax,” 228–41; Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 81; Holmes, “Ex-votos.” 29. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 59–73. 30. San Juan, Vertiginous Mirrors, 86–106. 31. On wax in early modern Italy and Zumbo’s wax techniques and experimentation, see Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 83–84, 88; Cagnetta, “Vie et l’ouvre,” 495. 32. On the hospital Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, see Maerker, Model Experts, 53–55, 60–62. 33. Puccetti, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo,” 23. 34. Cagnetta, “Vie et l’ouvre,” 495. 35. Ibid., 495–96. 36. Puccetti, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo,” 23–27; Puccetti, “Modelli anatomia del XVII secolo.” 37. Cagnetta, “Vie et l’ouvre,” 497. The Jardin des Plants wax head is of an old man, dead, in a prone position, and split in half, contrasting the textures and colors of aged skin and the flesh beneath. See Buffon and Daubenton, Histoire naturelle, 212–28. 38. Puccetti, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo.” 39. This wax head is currently kept in a small cabinet in the office of the director of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. In 2009, it was restored by Federica Dal Forno, who wrote that it might be by Zumbo, a proposition rejected by most Zumbo scholars. 40. All documents were made accessible to me by Professor Bellisi on behalf of the Accademia di Belle Arti. 41. Maerker, Model Experts, 34. 42. Puccetti, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo.” 43. On this sculpture, dated around 1625, see Díaz, “Iconografía de San Juan.” 44. Masciandaro, “Non Potest Hoc Corpus Decollari.”

45. Baert, “Johannesschussel as Andachtsbild,” esp. 135–37, 139–41. 46. Harvey, “Touching Organ,” 98. 47. Kristeva, Severed Head, 12. 48. On the problem of imaging the brain, see San Juan, “Gaetano Zumbo’s Anatomical Wax Model.” 49. Tascioglu and Tascioglu, “Ventricular Anatomy,” 58. 50. Cohen, “Meaning of the Head.” 51. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 167–91. 52. Clarke and Dewhurst, Illustrated History of Brain Function, 40, fig. 40. 53. This publication was followed in 1537 by an enlarged edition. Pantin, “Analogy and Difference,” 33–34. 54. See L. R. Lind’s introduction to Berengario da Carpi, On the Fracture of the Skull, xiv–xxiii. 55. Berengario da Carpi, On the Fracture of the Skull, 8–17. 56. Ibid., 7. 57. Ibid., 12–15. 58. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 5, p. 42. 59. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 5, p. 44. 60. Ibid., bk. 1, chaps. 6–8, pp. 57, 58–59, 64. 61. Tascioglu and Tascioglu, “Ventricular Anatomy,” 60. 62. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 5, pp. 44–46; this is a new addition to the 1555 edition, 22–23. 63. Berengario da Carpi, Isagogae breves, sec. 16 (unpaginated). 64. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 6, p. 54 (text), p. 36 (image). 65. Swanson, “Quest for the Basic Plan,” 360. 66. Tascioglu and Tascioglu, “Ventricular Anatomy,” 59. 67. Tubbs, Loukas, and Tubbs, “16th-Century Anatomist Carolus Stephanus,” 2. 68. Clarke and Dewhurst, Illustrated History of Brain Function, 56. 69. See, for example, Scatliff and Johnson, “Andreas Vesalius and Thomas Willis,” 22; this observation pertains to Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 7, plate 24. 70. Quoted in Swanson, “Quest,” 360.

71. See, for instance, the Fool with Abraham Ortelius’s map in place of his face; see San Juan, Vertiginous Mirrors, 1–4. 72. Berengario da Carpi, Isagogae breves, fol. 56r; see also Tascioglu and Tascioglu, “Ventricular Anatomy,” 61, fig. 7. 73. The frontispiece of the second edition of Utopia also uses the double image of the skull. 74. On the journey to Utopia, see Marin, Utopics. 75. On Anna Morandi’s career as an anatomist and maker of wax models, see Focaccia, Anna Morandi Manzolini; Messbarger, Lady Anatomist, 99–108; on the self-portrait, see Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 108–11, 155–62; Ghirardi, “Women Artists of Bologna.” 76. Focaccia, Anna Morandi Manzolini, 1–21; Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 196–201. The collection was bought back by the Institute of Sciences when Morandi died in 1774, and was installed in the Palazzo Poggi next to Lelli’s cabinet of anatomy. 77. Bernabeo, “Suppellettile anatomica,” 35. 78. Marin, Utopics, 179–91. 79. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 104. 80. Focaccia, Anna Morandi Manzolini, 6–8. Morandi was inducted into the Accademia Clementina in 1760, the Accademia of Belle Arti in 1755, and the Istituto delle Scienze in 1756. 81. See Margócsy, “Advertising Cadavers,” 198–99, fig. 3. 82. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 53–57 (quotation on 53). 83. Armaroli, Cere anatomiche bolognese, 73, cat. 41. The portrait was damaged during World War II and was restored on the basis of a nineteenth-century print (reproduced in Busacchi, “Cere anatomiche dell’Istituto delle Scienze,” 231). 84. Emiliani, “Ritratti in cera del 700 bolognese.” 85. Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, 33–55. 86. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 104–11. 87. San Juan, “Horror of Touch”; Messbarger, Lady Anatomist, 128–33. 88. San Juan, “Horror of Touch,” 445–47. 89. Anzieu, Skin Ego, 141, 145.

90. Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 87–88.

Chapter 5 1. The Palazzo Poggi houses the Istituto di Anatomia Umana Normale dell’Università di Bologna. See Armaroli, “Cere anatomiche bolognesi” and “Cere di Ercole Lelli”; Bottareli, “Ceroplasti bolognesi”; Cavazza, Settecento inquieto. On the founding of the Institute of Sciences by Luigi Ferdinando Marsili in 1711, and Prospero Lambertini’s contribution to the development of anatomical modeling in Bologna, see Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 1–3, 10, 25–54. 2. On wax and lifelikeness, see Panzanelli’s introduction to Ephemeral Bodies, 1–39; Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 6–7, 65–69. 3. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 12–16. 4. Maerker, “Towards a Comparative History”; Maerker points to the work of Michel Foucault and Svetlana Alpers. See Alpers, “Museum as a Way of Seeing.” 5. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 7. 6. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 56–92; Ruggeri and Barsotti, “Birth of Waxwork Modelling.” The project, initiated in 1734, was interrupted by the death of patron Niccolo Aldobrandini, and was resumed in 1742 by Lambertini, who by then had become Pope Benedict XIV. Dacome links this to the 1730s plans for rival projects in Sardinia and Turin. 7. The current arrangement of the cabinets is similar to the one in Lelli’s drawing, but a nineteenth-century drawing shows the cabinets divided in two and facing each other along a corridor; see Ruggeri and Barsotti, “Birth of Waxwork Modelling,” 102, fig. 4, and 104, fig. 7; Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 72, fig. 2.1. 8. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 57, 73. On Bologna’s anatomy theater, see ibid., 73–77; Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons.” 9. There are two versions of this engraving, one showing the anatomy lesson in progress and the other depicting the theater as a museum; see n. 13 below. See also Huisman, Finger of God, 39–51; Huisman, “Resilient Collections.” 10. Hallam, Anatomy Museum, 109–15;

Huisman, Finger of God, 39–41; Huebert, “Performing Anatomy,” 12–19. 11. Huisman, “Resilient Collections,” 74–76. 12. Holzapfel, Body in Pieces, 13. 13. Huisman, Finger of God, 39–41. The image is available at https://‌upload‌. wikimedia‌.org‌/wikipedia‌/commons‌/e‌/e5‌/ Gravure‌-théâtre‌-anatomique‌-Leyde‌.jpg. 14. Guggenheim, “Paracelsus and the Science of Nutrition”; Hieatt, “Eve as Reason”; Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 9. 15. McColley, Gust for Paradise, 164–71; Tigner, “Eating with Eve”; Musacchio, Milton’s Adam and Eve, 125–43. 16. On the postlapsarian body, see Crowther, Adam and Eve, 74–88. 17. Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 26–32. 18. Crowther, Adam and Eve, 55. 19. McColley, Gust for Paradise, 23; Crowther, Adam and Eve, 55–65, 107. 20. Austin, Haec Homo, 6. On Austin’s poem, see Almond, Adam and Eve, 41. 21. Bal, “Sexuality, Sin, and Sorrow”; Almond, Adam and Eve, 150. See also Turner, One Flesh, 119. 22. Thornton, State of Nature or Eden, 51; McColley, Gust for Paradise, 23; Almond, Adam and Eve, 153. 23. Austin, Haec Homo, 28–29. 24. Ibid., 13. 25. McColley, Gust for Paradise, 24. 26. On anatomical models, see Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 5–8. 27. Berkowitz, “Systems of Display,” esp. 365–67. 28. Holmes, “Ex-votos.” 29. On earlier wax body parts, see Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 81. 30. Ruggeri and Barsotti, “Birth of Waxwork Modelling,” 102, fig. 4. 31. Ibid., 104. 32. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 77–79. 33. Ibid., 48n106. 34. Berkowitz, “Systems of Display,” 365–67. 35. Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 89. 36. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 75; San Juan, “Horror of Touch.” 37. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 78–81,

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88–90. On Bologna and natural philosophy, see Findlen, Possessing Nature. 38. Ruggeri and Barsotti, “Birth of Waxwork Modelling,” 100–102. 39. Vesalius, Epitome, 90–91. 40. Ibid., xxxi. 41. Quoted in Armaroli, “Cere anatomiche bolognesi,” 43. 42. Gossaert’s Adam and Eve was owned by Charles I; see Ainsworth, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, 118; Almond, Adam and Eve, 43. 43. Quoted in Fréart, Idea of the Perfection of Painting, 72. 44. Killeem, Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place, 188. 45. Ainsworth, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, 118. 46. Ibid.; Kavaler, “Gossaert’s Bodies and Empathy.” 47. Classen, Color of Angels, 24. 48. Kleinbub, Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies, 1–21, 163–69. 49. Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 26–32. 50. Ibid., 26–28. 51. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 219–22. 52. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 232–46. 53. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 219–22. 54. On Deleuze’s notion of intensity, see Difference and Repetition, 222–61. 55. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 346–47. 56. On the creativity of nature and the links between matter and ancient art, see Bredekamp, Lure of Antiquity, 14–19, 69–80. 57. Smith, “‘Account of an Unaccountable Distemper,’” 462, 465, 467. 58. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 61–62. The écorché figure in the portrait was replicated for use in academies of fine arts. 59. Kusukawa associates seeing through the body with materiality rather than with the illusion of a coherent entity. Picturing the Book of Nature, 1–3. 60. Quoted in Armaroli, “Cere anatomiche bolognesi,” 43. 61. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 56–58.

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62. Ibid., 66–67; Azzaroli, “Specola,” 15; Ruggeri and Barsotti, “Birth of Waxwork Modelling,” 102–3. 63. Quoted in Ruggeri and Barsotti, “Birth of Waxwork Modelling,” 106. 64. The document is reprinted in ibid., 101, fig. 3. 65. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 65. 66. Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 88. 67. Crespi, Felsina pittrice, 302–7 (quotation on 303). 68. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 69–71. Lelli tried to discredit Manzolini (and his wife, Anna Morandi). The 1766 edition of Malvasia’s Pitture di Bologna referred to Lelli as the sole author of the cabinet and ignored Morandi’s display of models. 69. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 85–87, 77, 42; Bredekamp, Lure of Antiquity, 14–19. 70. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 43–49. 71. Pomata, “Malpighi and the Holy Body,” 111–14. 72. Agamben, Nudities, 59. 73. Almond, Adam and Eve, 65–78. 74. Ainsworth, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, 118. 75. Seidel, “Adam and Eve.” 76. Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 275. On the horizon, see Marin, “Frontiers of Utopia.” 77. Agamben, Nudities, 62–64. 78. Bal, “Sexuality, Sin, and Sorrow.” 79. People continue to complain about the impropriety of this part of the wax model even today. 80. Schlosser, “History of Portraiture in Wax,” 277, fig. 55, 281. 81. Walker, God Made Visible, 209–10. Part of this passage is discussed in Almond, Adam and Eve, 42. 82. Almond, Adam and Eve, 199–200. 83. Agamben discusses a relief panel from an eleventh-century Spanish silver reliquary in which Eve struggles against God’s attempts to make her put on a tunic made of animal skin. Nudities, 60–62. 84. Austin, Haec Homo, 32–33. 85. Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 1, chap. 2, p. 22. 86. Austin, Haec Homo, 31, 38.

87. Almond, Adam and Eve, 47, 46. 88. Thornton, State of Nature or Eden, 51–52. 89. Austin, Haec Homo, 41. 90. Ibid., 52–56. 91. Pettus, History of Adam and Eve, 65 (chap. 2, verse 22). 92. Austin, Haec Homo, 33–35. 93. Almond, Adam and Eve, 146. 94. Siraisi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity,” 77. 95. Pettus, History of Adam and Eve, 63–64. 96. Almond, Adam and Eve, 147. 97. Austin, Haec Homo, 65–66. 98. Crowther, Adam and Eve, 57. 99. Almond, Adam and Eve, 143–44. 100. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 23–25, 230, 301–2. 101. Bonuzzi and Ruggeri, “Apunti preliminari ad un’indagine,” 13–15. 102. Valverde, Historia de la composición, bk. 2, first plate; Vesalius, Fabrica, bk. 6, chap. 10, p. 587. 103. Kusukawa, “Fabrica as an Instruction Manual”; Wootton, Bad Medicine, 82–86. 104. Poggesi, “Collezione delle cere anatomiche,” 86–87; Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 480–84. 105. Ruggeri and Barsotti, “Birth of Waxwork Modelling,” 105. 106. On the use of human skeletons in making wax sculptures, see Bonuzzi and Ruggeri, “Apunti preliminari ad un’indagine,” 15. 107. Hallam, “Articulating Bones,” 467, 483–84. 108. Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet”; Stolberg, “Woman Down to Her Bones.” 109. Dacome, Malleable Anatomies, 66–67. 110. Turner, One Flesh, 214; Almond, Adam and Eve, 210. 111. Almond, Adam and Eve, 210. 112. Crowther, Adam and Eve, 74–88; Harris, All Coherence Gone, 4. 113. Almond, Adam and Eve, 35. 114. Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin, xi–xiv. 115. For another instance of Eve as a model for the android, see Fren, “Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow’s Eve.”

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Index Italicized page references are for illustrations. Endnotes are indicated with “n” followed by endnote number. Académie Royale des Sciences, Paris, 138 Accademia Clementina, Bologna, 149 Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, 135 Pietro Pisano, sculptor and member of Accademia, 135 Acquaviva, Claudio (Jesuit General), 114 Adam and Eve, 3, 32–33, 39, 58–63, 79, 97, 104, 106 107, 157–84 Adam and Eve, (van Eyck), Ghent Altarpiece, St. Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, 174 Adam and Eve (Gossaert), 166–67, 173–74, plate 22 Adam’s rib, 44, 99, 177–79 Adam’s skull, 44, 58–61 apple and indigestion, 104, 161 creation of Eve, 160, 162–63; God as surgeon, 178–80; the rib, 176–80, 182 Eve embodied 161–62, 169–72 Eve’s departure, 32, 157, 173–76 God Clothes Adam and Eve with skin tunics, San Francisco, Quito, 176, plate 24 and visual observation, 163–67 Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 17, 76, 79, 101, 171 Airès, Philippe, 53 Aldrovandi, Count, 165 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 90, 165 Almond, Philip, 163 Alvarez of Toledo, Cardinal Juan, 65 Americas, 31, 97 Amsterdam, 39 anatomy anatomical image, 3, 4, 27–29 and antiquities, 73–78, 172 and apes, 65, 87–90, 95 authority over body, 4, 27–28 cranium cross-section, 143–48 Egyptian medicine, 58 instruments (dissection and vivisection), 22–23, 127 practices, 67, 70–71 Spanish attitudes, 65, 73 table, 5, 11–12, 19, 21–23, 41–42

204

touch, 150–55, 157, 158, 171–72 See also anatomy lesson anatomy lesson, 2, 19–21, 40–42, 158–61 Anatomy Lesson, Vesalius, Fabrica (frontispiece), Padua, 19–21 Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolas Tulp (Rembrandt), 28 Leiden Anatomy Theatre, (Swanenburg), 159–61, 160 Anzieu, Didier, 153 Apes enacting the Laocoön, 39, 87–88, 87 Apollo Belvedere, 69, 76 Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, 10–11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 186n73 Asia, 31, 117 Austin, William, Haec Homo, 162, 163, 177–79 automaton, 3, 55, 181 Avicenna, 139 Avramescu, Cătălin, 4–5, 97 Azavedo, Ignatius de, 121 Bal, Mieke, 162–63, 173, 184 Barkan, Leonard, 73–74 Becerra, Gaspar, 71 Bellori, Giovanni, 7 Belvedere torso (Hercules), 37, 74, 82–86, 130 Pliny the Younger, 86 Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo, 2, 45, 54, 140– 41, 143, 147 Berger, Harry, 48, 53 Bergson, Henri, 50 Bernabeo, Rodolfo di, 19 Bianchi, Giuseppe (Medici Gallery), 134 body animation, 30, 43–45, 50, 67–71 artificial, 3, 181–84 (see also articulated skeleton) assemblage, 44, 162, 169, 183 blood, 105, 127, 131, 170 cranium, 128–29, 139–48 digestion/indigestion, 80, 82–83, 104, 166–67 embodiment, 65–66, 103, 138, 161, 162 flesh, 74, 78, 97–99, 105, 107, 171; exposed outside movement, 170–71 fragmentation, 35–38, 162 hand, 70–71 heart, 92–95

intestines, 85–86; 111–12 (Tupinamba) mutation, 30, 84, 127, 128 parallels to textile, fabric, weave, 83–85 reticella, 83–84 stomach, 45, 82–83 temporality, 50 (Bergson); 157–58 verticality, 8–9, 17–18, 56 Bolletti, Giuseppe Gaetano, 182 Bologna, 32 Institute of Sciences, 149, 158 Palazzo Poggi, 157, 165 bones, 30, 43–46, 113–18, 179 European and Indigenous bone rituals, 105, 118–21 hyoid bone, 62–63 rib, 82 See also body: cranium; skeleton; skull Brazil, 31, 97, 100, 120, 121 Bredekamp, Horst, 74 Bressani, Francesco, 116–17 Iroquois, 116 Map of New France, 116–17, 117 missionaries Jean de Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, 116 Browne, Thomas, 178, 180 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy, 103–4 Cabinet of wax models, Palazzo Poggi, Bologna, 149, 158–59, 181 Adam (Lelli), 161–62, plate 20 Eve (Lelli), 161–66, plate 18, plate 23, plate 25 Cabral, Antonio, 122 Cagnetta, Francois, 133, 134 Calvin, John, 180 cannibal and cannibalism, 1, 4–5, 31, 38, 74, 78, 92, 95, 97, 100, 107, 113 digestion and indigestion, 97, 103–5 ethnographic evidence, 101, 103, 106, 113 European fear of cannibalism, 119 practices, 107–10; Carios (ill slave), 109 Carlino, Andrea, 19, 28, 35, 54 Carnival, 2, 160 Carracci, Agostino, 6 Carracci, Annibale, 6, 7, 24, 56, 57 Farnese family palace, 6 Catholics and Protestants, 31, 119

Cohen, Esther, 119 Colombo, Realdo, 65, 72 De re anatomica, 39 Columbus, Christopher, 121 Cosimo de Medici, 84 criminal, 4–5, 12, 97 Crowther, Kathleen, 59

Geminus, Thomas, 38–39, 60–62 Genesis (bible), 3–4, 29, 32–33, 43, 58, 59, 61, 63, 79, 97, 103, 105, 158, 162, 183 Great Miseries and Misfortunes of War (Callot), 10–11, 10 Gross, Kenneth, 129–30 Guiglielmini, Domenico (scientist), 131

Dacome, Lucia, 159, 164, 172, 182 Daubenton, Louis-Jean-Marie (conservator to king’s museum), 134 De Bry, 97, 100, 103 America tertia pars, 97–100, 101, 105, 166; frontispiece, 106, 107 Cannibal feast, 97–100, 98 de Castelnau-L’Estoile, Charlotte, 120 de Certeau Michel, 100 de Léry, Jean, 95, 100, 102, 107, 116, 119, 123 Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 167, 180 and Félix Guattari, 49, 54, 139, 167 della Croce, Giovanni Andrea, 38 della Porta, Giacomo, 90 Desnoues, Guillaume, 131–34 Dryander, Johann, 104, 139–40, 144 Du Bartas, Guillaume de salluste, 180

Hallam, Elizabeth, 23, 181 Harcourt, Glenn, 37, 56, 74, 75, 80, 84 Harvey, Elizabeth, 137 head, face, brain, 31, 46–51, 127–48, 183, 184 in cannibalism, 107–13, 119 sculptural structure, 137–39 Hercules, 82 Hobbes, Thomas, 97 Holland, Thomas, 12 Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, Florence, 134 Hulme, Peter, 116 Hunter, William, 27

East and West India Companies, 114 Elias, Norbert, 104 Estienne, Charles, De dissection partium corporis humani, 145–46 Evelyn, John, 166, 174 Execution, An (Carracci), 1, 5–20, 22, 23, 26, 56, plate 1 Ex-Machina (Garland), 32, 183–84 Europe and Europeans, 27, 31, 97, 100, 103, 105, 106, 119 Fall, 3, 97, 104, 160, 162, 79, 101, 103 Falloppio, Gabriele, 39, 72 Fanucci, Camillo, 13 Florence, 84–85 Foucault, Michel, 1, 5, 12, 27, 28, 72, 100, 157 Discipline and Punish, 6, 27 Franceschi, Francesco, 35 Galatea, 129 Galen, 38, 54, 65, 78, 89 Gallonio, Antonio, 9 Garden of Eden, 61, 79, 97, 101, 161, 171, 173, 174 Tree of Knowledge, 61, 79, 161 Gaudio, Michael, 101

Indigenous practices and territories, 113 Janson, H.W., 39 Jesuits, 31, 114–16p^p^p Figueira, Luiz, 120 Francisco Borgia (General of Society of Jesuits), 121 missions in Paraguay, 124–25 Pinto, Francisco, 120–21 Virgin of Santa Maria Maggiore, 121 Karnal, Leandro, 120 Kircher, Athanasius, 118 Klestinec, Cynthia, 72–73 Koerner, Joseph, 173 Kracauer, Siegfried, 7–8 Kristeva, Julia, 83 Kusukawa, Sachiko, 45 Lafreri, Antonio and Salamanca, Antonio, 39, 71, 73 Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, 73, 90 Lambertini, Cardinal Prospero, 172 Landes, Joan, 37. Leclerc, Georges-Louis and Daubenton, Louis-Jean-Marie, Histoire naturelle, 134–35, 138 Latin, 65 Laocoön, 86–90 Lelli, Ercole, 164, 165, 170, 171, 172, 182, 183

Self Portrait, 168–69 Leonardo da Vinci, 144 Louis XIV, 134 Luther, Martin, 179 Marsyas, Valverde (frontispiece), La Anatomia, 77, 77 Malvasia, Carlo, 6, 7 Mansolini, 170, 171 Marin, Louis, 149 Martel, H.E, 97, 104, 119 Mercati, Michele, 74 Mesa, Juan de, John de Baptist, 136–37, plate 15 Mexico, 120 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 104, 161, 183 mingau, 111–12, 119 Women and children eating mingau, 110–13 Mongitore, Antonino, 132 Montaigne, Michel de, 1, 12, 29, 100, 116 “Of Cannibals”, 100 Montgomery, Scott, 124 Montmort, Jean Louis de, 134 Morandi Manzolini, Anna, 32, 149–55, 165 Ranuzzi, Girolamo (Senator), 149 Self Portrait, 149–55, plate 17 More, Thomas, Utopia, 147–48 Nancy, Jean Luc, 21, 29, 157 Natural/civil law, 4, 5, 97 “New World”, 1, 27, 32, 38, 95, 97, 100, 101, 103, 105, 113, 120 transportation of bones/relics, 105–6, 113–18 Nicolas Beatrizet, 71 Nudity and denuding, 3, 58, 79, 101, 174–75 Padua, 19 University, 39, 72 Paracelsus, 103, 161 Paradise, 3, 157, 162, 172, 173, 174 Park, Katharine, 20, 22, 23, 103 Secrets of Women, 28 Pauw, Peter, 159–60 Pettus, John, 178–79 Philip II of Spain, 66 Pinto, Francisco, 120–21 Pissarri, Carlo, (on Manzolini’s skills as wax modeler, 170) Plantin, Christopher, 39, 61 Vivae imagines partium corporis humani, 39, 61–63

index

205

print, 3, 28, 30, 71 Portuguese transportation of relics, 121 public punishment anatomical research, 1–2 crowd, 1, 6, 7, 95 hanging, 6, 9, 185n17 mannaia, 9, 22 practices, 6, 10, 11, 12 tavolette, 5, 13–17, 186n63; Bologna manual, 14; The Deposition/The Crucifixion, 14–16, plate 4, plate 5; John the Baptist, 16–17, plate 7 torture, 1, 9–10, 11 Pygmalion, 129 Relics, 105, 119–25 Cologne and St. Ursula’s virgins, 121 Cologne reliquaries, 124 de Borja, Dom Joao (collector of relics), 121 St. Sebastian, St. Bras, St. Christopher, 120 St. Ursula’s virgins, 31, 121–25; Death of the eleven thousand virgins (St. Alban’s Chronicle), 122–23, plate 9; and geographies of New World, 121, 191n92; Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia, 113 Robinson Crusoe, 116 Rome, 6, 13, 19, 31, 39, 71, 117, 120 Campidoglio, 90 Collegio Romano, 73, 117 Il Gesù, 115, 117, 118 Roman antiquities, 73–78 Roman armory, trophies, and war practices, 90–92 Sapienza La, 13, 19, 186n79 Trophies of Marius (in Esquiline), 90 Roundtree, Liz, 102 Ruysch Frederik, 150–51 St. Augustine, 161 St. Agatha, 140 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 95, 100 St. Lawrence, 99 St. John the Baptist, 16–17, 113, 136–37 Schlosser, Julius von, 134, 173 Schupbach, William, 52

206

index

Seville, Cathedral, 136 Sixtus V, 90 skeleton, 51–58, 181–83 articulated skeleton, 3, 43, 54, 118, 181 skin and skinning, 67–69, 74–80 as covering and clothing, 79–83 pellicia, 84 skull, 43–51 in “New world”, 113, 118–19, 121–25 Spanish language, 65, 66 medicine, 72 Specola (La), Museum of Zoology and Natural History, Florence, 135, 138 Staden, Hans, 99–100, 102, 107, 118 identity strategies, 104 Still Life with Skulls (Van der Schoor), 47– 50, plate 8 Stimmer, Abel, 52 Sugg, Richard, 95 Swanenburg, Willem, 159–60 Tanner, Mathias, 12 temporality, 1, 94 translation of images Valverde, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano, 65, 66 transportation of relics and human remains, 105, 117, 121 Trapp, John, 178 Tupinamba, 31, 97, 100, 101, 107, 113, 116, 119, 123, 125 ethnographic evidence, 101, 102, 103, 104; use of antique model, 101 Van Kessel, Jan, Continent of America, 112 Valegio, Francesco, 35 Valverde, 30, 37, 38, 39, 65–95, 138 Anatomia del corpo humano, 40, 149; 40 Figure holding sack of skin, 67–71, 68 Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano, 39, 65 illegibility of body, 75 restoration of antiquities and the image, 73–78 Valverde/Vesalius Controversy, 66, 71–73 Venice, 39, 71

Vesalius, Andreas, 1, 2, 23–27, 30, 39, 43–63, 65–95, 100, 144, 146–47, 161, 177, 183 Anatomia, frontispiece, 35–44, 36 Epitome, 38, 39, 58–59, 61, 62, 63, 164, 165 De humani corporis fabrica, 17–18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 39, 149, 181; frontispiece of, 19–21 illustrated letters, 17–18, 41, 46, 118 Thoracic cavity, 24–27, 25 violence and the body, 4–6, 8–11, 27, 28, 32, 95, 158, 159–61 cannibalism, 106–7 Girard, René, 4, 185n11 and the image, 2, 19, 21, 27–29 and knowledge, 27, 28, 97 life and death, 49, 53, 56–58, 92, 95, 137 pain, 1, 4, 12, 29, 76, 85–90, 91–92, 95, 166; pain and embodiment, 167–68 and transformation, 2, 3, 8–10, 85–87, 119, 136, 137 unpredictability, 4, 28–29 vivisection, 41–42, 87–88 human and none-human, 88–90 Voragine, Jacopo de, Golden Legend, 61 Walker, George, Protestant preacher, 173 Walker Bynum, Caroline, 123–24 wax model and modeling, 3, 28, 31, 164–65, 169–72, 181–83 wax modeling and embodiment, 170–71 Wellcome Collection, London, 138 Xavier, Francis, 114–16 travels of Francis Xavier’s corpse from Shangchuan Island (southern coast of China] to Goa, 114; Cosmas Saraina (anatomist of Francis Xavier), 114 Removal of arm of Francis Xavier (Convento Máximo de la Merced, Quito], 114–16, 115 Zumbo, Gaetano, 31, 136, 149, 151, 183 dissected head, 127–30, 191n5 disagreement with Desnoues, 131–33 travels 134 wax theatres, 133–34, 192n23