Article Knowe Thyself. Anatomical figures in Early Modern Europe CARLINO, Andrea Reference CARLINO, Andrea. Knowe Thyself. Anatomical figures in Early Modern Europe. RES : Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, 1995, vol. 27, p. 52-69 Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:43016 Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version. 1 / 1 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Knowe Thyself: Anatomical Figures in Early Modern Europe Author(s): Andrea Carlino Reviewed work(s): Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 27 (Spring, 1995), pp. 52-69 Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20166917 . Accessed: 05/02/2012 05:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, J. Paul Getty Trust are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. http://www.jstor.org 52 RES27 SPRING1995 Figure 1. Anatomical Fugitive Sheet (woman), 1662. Jobst de Negker (printer), Augsburg. Photo: Courtesy of Karl Sudhoff Institut, University of Leipzig. "Knowe thyself" Anatomical figures in early modern Europe ANDREA CARLINO Itmight be thought that human anatomy could their function and their possible circulation. They can, interest only doctors, perhaps artists, and, occasionally, of course, be considered rough summaries of university philosophers, as Galen wrote. Yet this was not the case. anatomical handbooks, but they also were elaborate if A very broad public was eager for information about crude typographical artifacts of a distinctly popular the human body, even ifwhat itwas given was often nature. The ?mages prevail over the text, which they coarse and approximate. Some strange printed fugitive sum up and simplify. The role of the images is sheets representing the male and female human body especially crucial because of the ambiguity of the are evidence of this, and they met with great success in social target for which these sheets were intended. As a many European countries from the first half of the matter of fact, the fugitive sheet became a vehicle for sixteenth century on. As in certain contemporary the transmitting of information, which was usually children's books, internal organs of the human body reserved for an intellectual elite or a specialized are revealed by peeling away the figure of the trunk.1 audience, to a much larger public. These sheets have not been unfamiliar to historians The sixteenth-century publishers, printers, and or bibliophiles,2 although what has been written about engravers of anatomical fugitive sheets seem to have them begs a number of crucial questions about both understood their role clearly. As cultural mediators, they created a genre that figuratively, as well as in terms of theme and language, broke the academic This research was undertaken thanks to a Jean Monnet Fellowship monopoly on the knowledge of anatomy. Thus, they from the Institute Domenico European University (San di Fiesole) and initiated ordinary people, whose curiosity about a contribution from the Wellcome Trust for the research conducted in themselves could not be satisfied by any existing class London. Iwould like to thank Vivian Nutton for valuable information of publication, into the secrets of the human on the use of certain anatomical fugitive sheets. body. anatomical 1. From my first chance discovery until the present day, I have Through fugitive sheets, knowledge partially succeeded in tracking down about forty of these images from the lost its strictly scientific connotation and was adapted and centuries. I some sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth found of to a multiplicity of often quite unexpected uses. them following random searches in Italian, English, and French libraries, but the greater number are in four collections: those of the Wellcome Historical Medical in the Taubman Library London, Library Paper bodies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the Royal Library in Stockholm, and the Library of the College of Physicians of These anatomical fugitive sheets were made up of Philadelphia. superimposed engraved figures. They were published 2. The first scholar to bring anatomical fugitive sheets to general from 1538, mostly in Germany, but also in France, attention was L. Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomical England, Holland, and Italy, and were Illustrations, ed. and trans. M. Franck (Chicago, 1920; German ed., usually woodcuts on two 1852), pp. 156-167. A systematic treatment is found in articles by printed separate sheets, representing L. Crummer, "Early Anatomical Fugitive Sheets," Annals of Medical a seated man and woman. A text, in Latin or in the 5 "Further Information on Anatomical History (1923): 189-209; Early vernacular, was arranged around the figures, giving the Fugitive Sheets," Anna Is of Medical History 7 (1925): 1-5; "Check List names of the parts of the body together with a brief of Anatomical Books Illustrated with Cuts of Superimposed Flaps," of the organs and their What Bulletin of the Medical Library Association n.s. 20 (1932): 131-139. description physiology. was characteristic and unusual in these was These articles also take account of the copies in Crummer's own sheets that collection, which is now located in the Taubman Library at the the trunk of the figures could be lifted up or peeled of at Ann Arbor. G. de University Michigan J. Lint, "Fugitive away. The internal organs were printed on several Anatomical Sheets," Janus 28 (1924): 78-91, gives a general overview. separate flaps of paper, cut out, and glued together so A basic description in catalog form but with information on the that could also be lifted in turn. The bottom copies in London is found in F. N. L. Poynter, Catalogue of Printed they layer the back Books in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library, I, Books Printed represented part of the thorax and the spine. Before 1641 (London, 1962), pp. 14-15. This technique of illustration made the printed object 54 RES 27 SPRING 1995 virtually three-dimensional. It also meant that the representations of the female body are identical, and internal parts of the body could be organized in a both sheets have the imperial printing license at the physiological system, an apparatus that could be seen foot of the page. Therefore, it seems probable that the as providing a functional and spatial relationship within right to publish these sheets was passed from one the framework of the body. printer to another. One can suppose that Jobst de Some of these sheets continued to be printed until Negker handed over the rights and perhaps also the the middle of the eighteenth century,3 and judging from blocks of his fugitive sheets to Vogtherr, although the the number of editions, must have met with a latter may possibly have been responsible for the commercial success incomparably greater than any original design.5 Indeed, Vogtherr republished them the other type of anatomical treatise published during those following year, while in June 1539 Negker reengraved years. Between 1538 and 1540 alone, at least fifteen and issued a bilingual version of Vesalius's Tabulae different editions were published in Europe. They anatomicae sex for the use of German students who undoubtedly contributed more than Andreas Vesalius's might have had difficulties with Latin.6 The simplicity De humani corporis fabrica to the spread of elementary of the metaphors (the stomach described as a harbor, knowledge about the interior of the human body, and, for instance), the elementary terminology, the emphatic therefore, to the construction of a broadly shared image graphic character, suggest that all these prints were in of the bodily self, common to a wide sector of fact intended for a nonspecialist public. The figures of European society. both man and woman are based on one drawing, the head being changed, as are the flaps of paper on which the thorax and the generative organs are Publishers, printers, and engravers represented. Each organ is marked in Latin, while some Strasbourg are reproduced a second time in the text that surrounds the main figure; there, the name is shown in the The inventor of these sheets is uncertain, as is the vernacular, together with a few rudimentary place where they were first published. At any rate, two anatomical-physiological notes, which could be editions were printed in Germany in 1538: one by attributed to Vogtherr. Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder at Strasbourg and one by Vogtherr was a versatile character; in addition to his Jobst de Negker at Augsburg (fig. 1).4 The activity as a printer, author, and engraver actively committed to the Protestant cause, he also executed 3. The publication of anatomical illustrations with superimposed and published works on topics ranging from urology figures continued until very recent times. Some, for instance, were made in the nineteenth century by Alexander Ramsay, George Black, and Robert Knox. 4. Anathomia, oder abconterfettung eynes Mans leyb, wie er 5. On the basis of the reproductions available, I could not . inwendig gestaltet ist. eynes Weybs leyb, wie er innwendig establish with certainty whether both Negker's and Vogtherr's women gestaltet ist (Strasbourg: Heinrich Vogtherr, 1538). I have not seen a were printed from the same block.