European Networks in the Baroque Era. Conference Paper proposal, 30/4/12
Representing the Body in Pietro da Cortona’s Tabula Anatomicae of 1619.
“There are those that operate within the space of the body, and- by studying perception, sensorial mechanisms, neuromotor diagrams, and the articulation common to things and to the organism- function as a sort of transcendental
aesthetic; these led to the discovery that knowledge has antomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within
the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it, but that its forms cannot be disassociated from its
peculiar functioning; in short, that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its own forms and that can be at
the same time made manifest in its own empirical contents.”
Michel Foucault
Foucault’s knowledge that “determines its own forms” can be applied to the problem of how the baroque body was
represented in the 17th century. The body spoke the truth of its own knowledge- it demonstrated itself, and selfdemonstration came feature highly in anatomical textbooks of the period, like Valverde’s Anatomia del corpo humano of
1560 where a remarkable plate shows the body dissecting itself. Pietro da Cortona’s representation of the body in 1619
continues that tradition of self- demonstration, but the artist modifies it by showing the eye as the agent of dissection, not
the hand. Cortona departs from Valverde by refusing to show the body dismantling its corporeal frame; instead, Cortona’s
body is dissected optically because the self-demonstrating body holds up mirrors and magnifiers that present the
microsystems of the body to the spectator.
It is difficult to fathom Cortona’s intentions in using these framing and visual devices. Possibly he knew about the use of
microcosmic mirrors which appeared in anatomical and religious texts of baroque scientific culture; but this paper argues
that they should be seen as substitutes for the knife that is used to cut open the flesh of the body. These optical framing
devices that contain biological fragments hint at the relation between the eye that penetrates into the body and the knife
that reveals it to the anatomical gaze, which in turn parallels the pen of the artist. As writers on early modern anatomy
have said, the anatomical project was founded on the idea of turning flesh into knowledge by opening up the body to the
anatomist’s gaze, which was not seen as an adjunct of the anatomical text relayed by the demonstrator’s hand, but an
independent gaze. Rather than seeing the opening up of the body as the route towards knowledge, we should see it as
complicit in a process that, affirms the anatomist’s subjectivity, and in the case of Cortona’s drawings, suggests the
subjectivity of the artist.
The treatment of the body in Cortona’s anatomical drawings also raises the question of what motivated the artist to depart
from a conventional Vesalian type in the earlier stages of the sequence in order to subject it to increasing distortion as the
anatomical series continued. This paper argues that movement away from the Vesalian model of representing the body
authoritatively could be construed as evidence of uneasiness at showing the structures of the body by artistic means. It
thus hopes to stimulate debate on the relationship between artistic intention and anatomical knowledge, and locate the
issue within medical and artistic networks in seventeenth-century Rome.
Dr David Packwood, University of Warwick, U.K. david.packwood@warwick.ac.uk davidpackwood1@gmail.com
David Packwood received his Phd on Poussin from the University of Birmingham in 2005. He is teaches at Warwick
University in the U.K. He has published various reviews and articles on art history for English, American and Canadian
journals. Recent publications include: “Socrates Becomes Narcissus: Moral Mediation and Artistic Representation in Achille
Bocchi’s Symbolicarum quaestionum,” Kuntstexte, Spring, 2011; “From Pictor Philosophus to Homo Economicus: Renegotiating Social Space in Poussin’s Self-Portrait of 1649-50,” in Space and Self in Early Modern European Cultures, eds.
David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska, (University of Toronto, June, 2012).Recently, he has participated in
symposia on Hubert Damisch at the University of Amsterdam in 2009; and colloquia on the early modern body: College Art
Association, Los Angeles, 2009; Universities of York and Durham, 2010.