The Alliance of Science and Art in Early Modern Europe

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The Alliance of Science and Art in Early Modern Europe

Overview

Throughout the Middle Ages, European artists concentrated on religious subjects. Whether a piece of sculpture on the facade of a cathedral, a mural on a monastery wall, an altarpiece, or an illustration in a prayer book, most medieval art served a religious function: to focus people's attention on attaining salvation. The development of the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy and its spread to Northern Europe dramatically changed this. Since Renaissance humanistic thought emphasized nature and the beauty of the human body, artists now attempted to duplicate the natural world in their work. They enthusiastically incorporated this new naturalism into their art and in doing so, played a major role in creating new sciences, particularly those of anatomy and botany, the earliest of the modern life sciences. Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Albrecht Dürer were as crucial to the development of modern science as they were to the formation of postmedieval art.

Background

The period after 1450 was marked by constant upheavals as the millennium-long culture of medieval Europe disintegrated. Religious unity was broken by the Protestant Reformation. Feudal society was radically changed by the rise of cities, the beginnings of capitalism, and the emergence of the middle class. The great age of exploration began—an expansion that would have momentous consequences for both the Old and New Worlds. There were also dangers before which the medieval consensus seemed powerless: bitter power struggles between nobles and monarchs; outbreaks of the Black Death (bubonic plague), which repeatedly swept through Europe (syphilis also appeared in epidemic proportions); and in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks, a new Moslem power that began pushing relentlessly into Europe.

Many intellectuals responded by seeking new ways to view the world and mankind's place in it. Paradoxically, they found the basis of their modern thought in writings from the ancient world. For centuries, texts from ancient Greece and Rome had been known in Europe, many having been preserved in the Arabic world. They had been largely ignored until the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, which culminated in the fall of Constantinople, bringing a flood of Greek texts to Italy as Byzantine scholars fled Turkish rule. As these texts were translated into Latin, an intellectual movement called humanism arose. Like the ancient writings themselves, humanists stressed that the proper study of scholars should be mankind, not heaven. Thus, humanism was a shift from theology to philosophy. Since the ancient texts also expressed a strong interest in science, a major factor in Renaissance humanism was the desire for more knowledge of the human body and of the world of nature.

One result of this emphasis on the body was a growing interest in anatomy, the study of the structures beneath the skin. The pre-Renaissance authority on human anatomy was Galen (130?-200?), a Greek physician in the Roman Empire. However, Galen had not dissected humans, since the Romans opposed that practice. He had instead carefully dissected animals, mainly pigs and monkeys, and assumed that humans were the same. Since there are numerous differences between human and animal anatomy, his work was filled with errors. Galen's texts had been preserved in Arabic translations but had never been corrected, since there were also prohibitions against human dissection in the Islamic world. When early Renaissance scholars did note a difference between Galen's descriptions and a human cadaver, they assumed that the text they were using had been erroneously copied.

The duplication of texts and illustrations was crucial to the development of Renaissance science. Hand-copied texts usually contained errors and hand-copied illustrations were virtually worthless because repeatedly copying a drawing necessarily degrades what the original artist intended. The adoption of printing from moveable type (around 1450) and the incorporation of woodcut (after 1500) and then engraved (after 1550) drawings permitted accurate texts and detailed, informative illustrations to be disseminated throughout Europe. Artists, of course, were essential to producing these accurate, detailed illustrations. This was particularly important in the sciences of anatomy and botany, where illustrations are of greater value than the text in conveying information.

Impact

Since 1300, Italian universities were permitted to carry out dissections of humans in their medical schools. Although not frequent events because the only legal cadavers were those of executed criminals, by about 1500 scholars began to notice that Galen's descriptions were often different from what was seen in the bodies on the dissection table. They realized that if the science of anatomy was to progress, these discoveries had to be illustrated and disseminated. At the same time, based on the revival of Greek and Roman texts, Renaissance artists sought to depict the human body more realistically, particularly in situations of dramatic movement. The few medieval nudes that existed (Adam and Eve, Christ's crucifixion) gave artists no naturalistic tradition to follow.

Artists began to examine carefully the body as it moved. This concentration on the exterior muscles of the body reached its culmination in Antonio Pollaiuolo's (1432-1498) large engraving, The Battle of Ten Naked Men (1460s), in which he depicted male nudes in the violent action of mortal combat. However, he crammed so many contracted muscles and sinews on each figure that the drawings were not realistic. Artists realized that for more accurate knowledge of the human body they would have to attend dissections. Indeed, many artists taught their pupils that only by doing dissections themselves could they attain the knowledge they sought. By the mid-1500s, dissections had become part of the artist's routine.

No one was more responsible for this development than Leonardo da Vinci. He insisted that artists could avoid the errors made by Pollaiuolo only by probing beneath the muscles deep into the body's structure to explore the organs, the nervous system, arteries, and so forth. Da Vinci himself dissected at least thirty bodies, including one of a pregnant woman and one of an old man. His meticulous drawings were the first accurate and informative anatomical illustrations ever made. He compared human anatomy with that of animals and explored pathological (diseased) anatomy such as hardening of the arteries. He also originated a number of illustration techniques that became commonplace in the subsequent history of anatomical images.

One crucial innovation was that of rotation, of looking at the same body part from a number of different angles. This allowed da Vinci to accurately portray a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional drawing. Other techniques first used by Leonardo were that of transparency (making overlying tissue transparent in order to reveal underlying structures) and traverse sections, or drawings that revealed what would be seen if the body was sliced crosswise.

Da Vinci's drawings and their accompanying text were not published until the late nineteenth century. However, they had some immediate influence because numerous contemporary artists saw his notebooks and copied his work. More importantly, Leonardo widely publicized the fact that words were inadequate to describe the complexities of anatomy and that the science could only advance through the use of careful, artistic illustrations: "The more detail you write," he noted, "the more you will confuse the mind of the reader." The truth of this observation can be seen in the most famous of all anatomies, Andreas Vesalius's (1514-1564) De humani corporis fabrica (1543). While Vesalius made numerous corrections of Galen's work, the more than 200 accompanying woodcut illustrations gave his text intelligible meaning. Their unknown artist (perhaps Joannes Stephanus of Calcar, of whom very little is known) deserved as much credit for the book's success as did Vesalius himself. Over the next century and a half, anatomical knowledge was conveyed more by illustrations than by texts. Their artists and engravers, virtually all of whom are unknown to us, developed their skills by doing dissections themselves or by watching anatomists dissect. Vesalius complained that so many artists crowded around his dissecting table, they interfered with his work.

One of the men influenced by Leonardo da Vinci and Italian humanism was the German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). He made several protracted visits to Italy, where he saw Leonardo's notebooks. Dürer's interest in the human body is obvious in his clinically accurate portraits, including several self-portraits. His anatomical drawings are still admired today, especially his famous Praying Hands (1508). His nudes perhaps most clearly reflect his devotion to capturing reality. His ink drawing The Women's Bath (1496), depicting a group of nude women of all ages in a public bath, was an attempt to show what the aging process does to the human body. He even drew a nude self-portrait. He spent much of his energy trying to find the "laws" of anatomical proportions, and was working on his Treatise on Human Proportions at the time of his death. In all of this, Dürer was motivated by his belief that beauty could only be attained by the exact copying of the natural world.

Dürer's alliance of artistic observation and scientific detachment is even clearer in his many drawings and paintings of animals, birds, and plants. He wrote that "life in nature reveals the truth of things." Ironically, he contracted the sickness that eventually killed him on a trip to sketch a beached whale. Like Leonardo, Dürer took great pride in the accuracy of his plant drawings. Undoubtedly the most important of these nature paintings was his The Great Piece of Turf (1503), a life-sized representation of grasses and dandelions in a clod of earth. No one as famous as Dürer had ever painted anything so apparently insignificant before, yet this single painting had a tremendous artistic and scientific impact in Europe.

The period from about 1470 to 1670 was one when herbals (compilations of plants focusing on their medicinal uses) were being replaced by books that dealt with the structure and classification of plants. An impetus for this trend was the thousands of new plant specimens brought to Europe from around the world by the returning adventurers of the Age of Exploration. As the modern science of botany evolved, Dürer's Turf played a pivotal role at a crucial period. Most publishers had been content to keep using the old, inaccurate woodcuts from medieval herbals because they were cheaper than hiring artists to produce new, accurate illustrations. The influence of Dürer's insistence on accuracy made that practice impossible, at least in Northern Europe.

In the 1530s, Otto Brunfels (1489?-1534) published a three-volume Living Images of Plants. While his text was unexceptional, the book's more than two hundred illustrations by Hans Weiditz were revolutionary. Unlike his predecessors, Weiditz had clearly used real specimens for his models, even including leaves partially eaten by insects. In 1542 another German, Leonhard Fuchs (1501-1566), published De historia stirpium. Its 500 illustrations were drawn by three artists of exceptional skill. Unlike Weiditz's work, they drew ideal plants with no flaws. Subsequent botanical artists used this approach because the purpose of the illustrations was to represent the species as accurately as possible. Fuchs's artists also produced botanical illustrations of great beauty, a trend that would continue throughout the early modern period and culminate in the remarkable plant illustrations of Maria-Sybilla Merian (1647-1717).

ROBERT HENDRICK