| This multidisciplinary dissertation investigates a new type of American portraiture that emerged during the late 1990s and that uses diagnostic images of the human interior produced by medical technology as its main elements of identity. The new art work, which I am calling medical-technology art, calls into question the relationship between mainstream art and medicine, a relationship which began with the revival of human dissections and the development of anatomical atlases in the early Renaissance. Also during the early Italian Renaissance, naturalism, a convention for drawing and painting that attempts to imitate optical experience, was developed, partly as a result of the involvement of artists with anatomists, human dissections, and illustrating anatomical atlases. Naturalism was not only a means of creating "true-to-life" images, it was also a means by which art could achieve the status of science as an observer of the world. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the original relationship between mainstream art and medicine, in which both were equal partners in examining and defining the human being, gradually ended as medicine became more engaged with viewing and imaging technologies and art became less dependent upon Renaissance naturalism.;I argue that medical-technology art is a reunion of the historical partnership between art and medicine. My hypothesis is twofold: (1) That there is an historic and aesthetic relationship between artistic images and the images of medical technology, and (2) that understanding the creating of and responding to images of art may offer a new perspective on images of medicine. I will argue not only that medical-technology art is a continuation of the historic relationship between medicine and art, but also that this new art form is indicative of an evolution in the cultural concepts of portraiture and naturalism---an evolution inspired partly by medical technology. Once again, art may be seeking the status of medical science. Finally, I suggest a role for the medical humanities can be that of interpreting the images of medical-technology art to facilitate the renewed dialogue between art and medicine. |
