Représenter le corps anatomisé aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles : entre curiosité et vanité

Abstract

In the Renaissance era, curiosity about anatomy promoted a new visiblity of the body whose insides were now represented. As a visible figure hiding the secrets of life, the body as mirabilia induced libido sciendi : one opened the body to see and to know. Hence the importance of engravings, which aimed to give an image of what had never been seen, lifting the veil, thanks to a rhetoric of evidentia which emphasized the gesture of showing. But this scientific curiosity could not cancel out the anxiety caused by the image of the dissected body, which dramatized the materiality of man’s mortal frame, revealing its nothingness and turning the anatomy lesson into an emblem of human vanity. In the texts, faceless cutaway figures and melancholy skeletons suggest the return to nothingness. It is as if anatomical illustrations confronted all scientific endeavours with their own vanity through shock and fascination ; turning the image of the body into an efficient epistemological tool seemed doomed to fail. The presence of both curiosity and vanity is what explains the “uncanny” the engravings reveal, as well as the fact that they cannot be neutral. In contrast, Christian imagery successfully substituted vain curiosity for “pious curiosity” in the exhibition of Christ’s open body. In Paleotti’s Esplicatione del sacro lenzuolo (1598), the shroud of Turin is presented as anti-anatomy because curiosity here implies deconstruction of the body and contemplation of its absence, revealing that the ideal image of the body is a body without a body, a representation that avoids imitation and therefore also the vanity of the image.

Keywords

• anatomy
• dissection
• vanity
• curiosity
• Vesalius
• scientific revolution