Artists and anatomists

There is no better way to introduce this delightful book by Hyatt Mayor, Curator of Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1946-66, than to quote the opening sentences of the author's own short preface: "Histories of anatomy exist in sufficient quantity, so this essay revolves around two questions only: What have artists done to record dissections and so help anatomists to see? And what, in turn, have anatomists discovered to help artists in portraying man's body? These questions center on the everlasting preoccupation of Western art, which is the study of man." The posthumous publication of the manuscript which Mayor had written some thirty years earlier is, in a sense, a milestone in the sporadic but continuing collaboration which medical historians and art historians have enjoyed over the decades. The medical historians have been fairly consistent in treating the contributions of artists, as a survey of this journal reveals. The art historians have been more fickle, and in recent decades there has been very little discussion in their "trade periodicals" of the work that many major artists produced in the area of anatomical illustration. A comparison between the date of the research and writing of Mayor's manuscript and the publication date of the book is significant in this regard, and we may hope that the decision to publish it at this time indicates a revival of interest in the art world on the subject. The year 1943 furnished a convenient focus for the study of anatomical illustration, as it marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of Vesalius's Fabrica and Epitome. 1934 had seen the publication of the Icones anatomicae, from the original wood-blocks for these publications, with the learned explications of J.B. de C.M. Saunders and C.D. O'Malley. The project to publish a facsimile of this edition was delayed by the war until 1950, by which time the original blocks had been destroyed in the bombing of Munich. The Vesalian quatercentenary also provided the occasion for William Ivins, Mayors' mentor and predecessor at the Metropolitan, to publish his controversial essay on the Vesalian artists, unique in the literature as an analytical study of this famous problem informed by knowledge of "how prints are made". It was in the context of this intellectual ferment that Mayor began to indulge his well-known curiosity about all aspects of printed illustration, leading to the present book. The book attempts to survey anatomical …