Anatomy

Art that studies or displays the structure of the body, from Renaissance dissection drawings to contemporary reworkings of medical imagery.

7 works · 10 related artists

About

Artists have needed to know what lies beneath the skin as much as doctors. Renaissance painters studied muscles and bones to make figures move convincingly; Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of around 1510 map the shoulder and heart with a precision far ahead of his time. The printed plates of Andreas Vesalius's Fabrica (1543) set a new standard, and academy students drew from the flayed figure, or écorché, such as the one Jean-Antoine Houdon modelled in Rome in the 1760s.

Dissection itself became a subject. Rembrandt van Rijn's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) turns a public lecture into a group portrait, and George Stubbs dissected horses for some eighteen months to prepare The Anatomy of the Horse (1766). Contemporary artists take the diagram apart: Kiki Smith modelled organs and bodily systems in the 1980s, and Damien Hirst enlarged a child's anatomical toy into the painted bronze Hymn (2000).