Visualizing the Body in Art, Anatomy, and Medicine since 1800

Models and Modeling

Andrew Graciano, Andrew Graciano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351004008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

This book expands the art historical perspective on art's connection to anatomy and medicine, bringing together in one text several case studies from various methodological perspectives. The contributors focus on the common visual and bodily nature of (figural) art, anatomy, and medicine around the central concept of modeling (posing, exemplifying and fabricating). Topics covered include the role of anatomical study in artistic training, the importance of art and visual literacy in anatomical/medical training and in the dissemination (via models) of medical knowledge/information, and artistic representations of the medical body in the contexts of public health and propaganda.

PART I
ANATOMICAL MODELS IN ARTISTIC TRAINING: SCULPTED, LIVING, AND DISSECTED

1

Anatomy in the Drawing Room at Felix Meritis Maatschappij in Amsterdam: Between Skin and Bones, Theory and Practice

Andrew Graciano

Adriaan de Lelie (1755–1820) painted Dr. Andreas Bonn’s Anatomy Lecture before the Department of Drawing at Felix Meritis (Plate 1.1. Amsterdam Museum, 1792), one of four paintings he created between 1792 and 1808 for the Felix Meritis Maatschappij (Happiness through Merit Association) of Amsterdam to commemorate the learned society’s activities.¹ The organization was a remarkable microcosm of the sort of polymathic interests that typified the Age of Enlightenment. A privately funded society of middle-class, educated male burghers, Felix Meritis occupied in 1789 its new, purpose-built Neoclassical building on Keizersgracht, which still stands. The structure included a concert hall; an auditorium; a physics room (for scientific experimentation and demonstration) with space for a sizeable instrument collection; a gallery of plaster casts of ancient sculpture; an observatory; and a drawing classroom. The association itself was divided into five departments—Natuurkunde (Physics or Natural Philosophy); Letterkunde (Literature); Koophandel (Commerce); Muziek (Music); and Tekenkunde (Drawing).²

The portrait and genre painter, Adriaan de Lelie, became a member of Felix Meritis in 1787. In the spirit of social community, members were obligated to contribute their time, money, and/or talents to the good of the organization. It was for this reason that De Lelie painted Dr. Andreas Bonn’s Anatomy Lecture. The painting depicts portrait likenesses of the Drawing Department members—mostly amateur artists, likely of varying skill levels—observing and listening to the esteemed surgeon and obstetrician discuss the anatomy of the human body, using a live nude model and a skeleton as visual aids. A professor of obstetrics and surgery at the nearby Athenaeum Illustre,³ Andreas Bonn (1738–1817) was also an art-lover, who had delivered the inaugural speech on the opening of the Drawing Department’s room on 3 November 1789.⁴ His lengthy discourse evidences a broad awareness of art and its cultural historical significance, as well as a deeper understanding of classical art theory from Antiquity to the eighteenth-century present.

De Lelie’s Anatomy Lecture displays an anatomy lesson within a life-drawing class, the skeleton included to reaffirm the scientific nature of the moment depicted. Chosen undoubtedly for his superlative anatomical physique, the live model—intentionally posed in the attitude of (i.e., modeling) the famed Apollo Belvedere—simultaneously recalls the prized ancient sculpture and, indeed, academic art theory in practice. In light of Dr. Bonn’s anatomical expertise and art-theoretical knowledge, I argue that it is the representative simultaneity of anatomical/mortal reality and of artistic/timeless ideals that creates a site of conflict around the model, and an ambiguity of purpose, both anatomically and artistically. This ambiguity allows the model, and the painting as a whole, to oscillate within art-theoretical and anatomo–surgical debates that seem to parallel one another in the Netherlands in the late eighteenth century.

Dutch artists in the 1700s long labored under the looming shadow cast by the Golden Age of the preceding century.⁵ At the same time, the sale of a number of key collections of seventeenth-century Dutch art to foreign collectors also affected artistic life in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. While some art-lovers, like Bonn, had mixed feelings about the movement of great collections of seventeenth-century Dutch art to foreign lands—a sense of pride in the popular appreciation of, and demand for, such work on the one hand, and one of mournfulness about diminished cultural patrimony on the other⁶—others took greater issue with the state of contemporary art and taste. For example, in Study of the Causes of the Decline of Painting in the Netherlands, E. M. Engelberts wrote, “No time has been less auspicious for art than our own.” He went on to theorize the reasons why eighteenth-century Dutch artists lagged behind their Golden Age counterparts.⁷ As Koolhaas and De Vries explain, Engelberts’ arguments are macroeconomic at their core, blaming the Dutch themselves for preferring the status afforded by imported finery in the fine and decorative arts, while allowing national treasures to be exported (and, thus, domestically undervalued). The title of his ‘study’, however, also strongly hints at a dissatisfaction with the (declining) quality and quantity of contemporary artistic production and innovation at home. The pervasive tastes and collecting habits of wealthy Dutch burghers led artists to find gainful employment copying or very closely emulating either seventeenth-century Dutch art or an international Rococo aesthetic, rather than to innovate within an existing tradition and according to their individual aesthetic proclivities. This phenomenon only further served to feed a cultural nostalgia for past greatness. In many ways, Felix Meritis was a product of such a longing. Engelberts, a member of this association, is depicted in De Lelie’s The Opening of the Felix Meritis Building in 1788 (Amsterdam Museum, ca. 1800).

De Lelie himself was not exempt from working within the cultural economy of nostalgia. The figural painter was equally renowned for portraits and genre paintings,⁸ many of which were similarly dependent, on some level, on seventeenth-century artistic traditions, while other conversation pictures such as The Art Gallery of Jan Gildemeester Jansz. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1795) attest to his practiced skill at reproducing Golden Age masterworks.⁹ For his part, the art collector Gildemeester collected and displayed high quality old master pictures and also commissioned contemporary work from artists like De Lelie.

1.1 Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). The Royal Cabinet of Paintings, Mauritshuis, The Hague.

De Lelie’s Anatomy Lecture is itself arguably indebted to the long-standing tradition—especially in the Netherlands—of anatomy lesson pictures, considered a sub-genre of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraiture.¹⁰ Anatomy lesson paintings depict a well-known, ambitious medical practitioner in the act of dissecting a cadaver for the edification of the equally ambitious onlookers—students and other successful medical professionals. They often memorialize the anatomist’s particular achievements or contributions to the field. Julie V. Hansen discusses some of the best-known examples, commissioned by the Amsterdam Surgeons’ Guild (Amsterdamse Chirurgijnsgilde) between 1603 and 1758, especially Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (Figure 1.1, 1632); Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Joan Deyman (1656); Adriaen Backer’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederik Ruysch (1670); and Jan van Neck’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederik Ruysch (1683).¹¹ These and three others were displayed in the meeting rooms of the surgeons’ guild to commemorate the social prestige afforded the guild members and the didactic significance of their public dissections. The earlier examples, such as Aert Pieters’ Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Sebastiaen Egberts (1603), primarily maintain the social artifice of other Netherlandish group-company portraits seen also in works by artists like Frans Hals. Rembrandt’s Dr. Tulp, however, is distinctly different in its visual focus on the anatomical demonstration—for sitters and viewers alike. According to Hansen, it marked a new standard for such anatomical lesson paintings in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

While De Lelie’s anatomy lesson follows Rembrandt’s lead by contriving to show a candid assembly of men—most of whom are visually focused on the anatomist and his demonstration—it departs from the anatomy lesson genre in some very significant ways. The portrayal of Dr. Bonn at work, as it were, does not highlight his expertise in either obstetrics or surgery or dissection. Rather, it shows him as a lecturing member of the Drawing Department at Felix Meritis. Moreover, the anatomical body under consideration in Bonn’s lesson is not a cadaver, but a living nude male, modeled after a well-known but unseen marble sculpture and, more immediately, its plaster mimesis in an adjacent room.¹² Finally, Bonn’s audience is not composed of medical peers, but artists, who necessarily represent the membership of the Drawing Department, not the surgeons’ guild.

If we allow that Felix Meritis, a private corporation of learned men, established the Drawing Department to teach and develop artistic and practical drawing skills in a setting that mimics an academic situation,¹³ then we should also consider De Lelie’s painting (in its departure from the seventeenth-century anatomy lesson genre) as a distinctly modern subject. It is at once a group portrait of a kind of academic membership and a scene of a life-drawing class led by an appointed anatomy professor. It recalls certainly and most immediately—though perhaps unwittingly—Johann Zoffany’s The Royal Academicians (Royal Collection, 1771–1772) and his William Hunter Lecturing (Royal College of Physicians, ca. 1770–1772). Both of Zoffany’s works depict Dr. William Hunter, who was Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Hunter and Bonn seem to have been cut from the same cloth—both obstetricians, surgeons, and anatomists with deep personal affinities for the visual arts. The Royal Academicians was known widely via engraved prints; Jan Gildemeester’s collection contained an example that would almost certainly have been known to De Lelie.¹⁴ It shows the membership of the Royal Academy of Arts attending a life-drawing class—although no one is drawing—in which one male nude model is being carefully posed, while the other undresses in preparation. Although Hunter stands next to the RA president, his role as anatomy professor is not overtly indicated.¹⁵ Zoffany’s unfinished...