| This dissertation examines the pivotal intersection of sixteenth-century anatomical studies and Renaissance visual, literary and dramatic artistic traditions. Beginning with Andreas Vesalius' monumental opus, De humani corporis fabrica (1543), my analysis of the early modern discipline of anatomy at the university in Padua reveals the emergence and consolidation of a discipline within a theatrical matrix. My project extends the recent critique of histories of science, which have seen Vesalius as the watershed figure of Renaissance anatomical science. Instead of viewing Vesalius and his work in isolation, I locate his text among the other dynamic exchanges taking place in the sixteenth century between the academic tradition of anatomy and popular culture. As the history of anatomical illustration reveals, Vesalius' legacy was one of precision inflated with dramatic flair. The traditions of anatomy (e.g. practice, publication, illustration) from Vesalius on reveal the ineluctable fusion of art and science. I begin with an analysis of the theatrical and carnivalesque components of Vesalius' public dissections in Padua during the mid-sixteenth century and show how such theatrical demands played a role in the later construction of anatomy theaters in Padua (1594), Bologna (1637) and Venice (1671). Based on that history, I offer a reading of the frontispiece of the De fabrica based on the ways it featured a public dissection as a spectacular event and, then, the muscle men figures as pastoral expressions that appeared throughout the post-Vesalian iconography. I conclude by tracing the impact of Vesalius' work in the English midwifery manual, The Birth of Mankind, to suggest how academic notions of anatomy came to interpolate the everyday lives of Londoners in the sixteenth century. |
