An outline of the history of art in its relation to medical science : being the substance of an introductory address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885 / by William Anderson.

  • William Edwin Anderson
Date:
[1887?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An outline of the history of art in its relation to medical science : being the substance of an introductory address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885 / by William Anderson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    The period of Lionardo and of the succeeding generation was a glorious one in the history of art, for while the great Tuscan was yet in the vigour of his age, a reflex of his many-sided genius appeared in Michelangelo Buonarotti—at once painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and poet—and the younger man had reached the zenith of his fame when his predecessor, full of years and honours, expired in the arms of the monarch whose graceful tribute to genius did more to immortalise his royal memory than the Field of the Cloth of Gold and all the prodigal magnificence of a long, unlucky reign. Michelangelo, like Lionardo, perceived at once the advan- tages to be derived from an association of art with anatomy. Realdo Colombo became his Marcantonio, and for twelve years, first in Florence then in Rome, he devoted himself to the study of the human body. The results are manifest, perhaps a little too plainly, in all his works. His statues of David, the Captives, and many others, are wonderful evidences of anatomical observation, and the preliminary models for his sculptures, in which the muscles were accurately built up in wax upon a framework of wire, attest the care he took to ensure accuracy. The nude figures in his Cartoon of Pisa, or rather in the copy, which is all that is left to us, bear witness to the same comprehensive view of the truth that professed anatomists had still to seize; but the sculptor and painter gave nothing to medical science. The work of his friend Colombo appeared in 1559 without a single illus- tration beyond a woodcut frontispiece of a dissecting-room scene, and there is no record of any drawings by Michelangelo like those which Lionardo is said to have executed for Marc- antonio. For artists the Florentine retaught the lesson impressed 2000 years before, and in even nobler style, by the sculptors of ancient Greece, that the most perfect ideal of beauty in art is attainable only by the most searching study of the real in nature. The third great star of the Renaissance, Rafaelo Santi, again painter, sculptor, and architect, won triumphs as enduring as those which fell to the lot of his rival and contem- porary, but they were of a somewhat different nature. He was perhaps less an anatomist than either Lionardo or Michel- angelo, but fewer years were allotted to him for the consum-
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