The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy Review

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(More customer reviews)Gross Anatomy has always sounded to the lay public as some kind of perjorative about what medical students due, what pornographers do, and what artists perch above the cadaver to represent. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. For centuries artists and scientists have been joined at the hip - witness Vesalius and his immaculate engravings of the musculature and skeltons of the dissected bodies obtained by grave robbers under the umbrella of education. In this superbly written and illustrated volume Deanna Petherbridge and Ludmilla Jordanova have gleaned some of the finest examples of the study and representation of the human body resulting from this still ongoing duplicity between anatomists/physicians and artists. The journey here is well documented from the earliest forms to the latest depictions of how intensive visual and manual dissection of the human body has contributed to some of the finest art in the world. Bravo to the authors for opening a door to the lay public to once and for all subsume the negative implications of the term Gross Anatomy. Superb book!

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The human body has long been central to Western art, and in order to represent the body in all its manifestations many artists have studied anatomy: dissecting the dead to better depict the living. The Quick and the Dead focuses on a range of artists, among them Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Albrecht Drer, William Hogarth, George Stubbs, Thodore Gricault, Kiki Smith, Joel-Peter Witkin, and Cindy Sherman to show the great richness and complexity that can result when art and science intersect. The drawings, prints, photographs, and objects in this book span five centuries and mark numerous cultural shifts, yet their imagery is as powerful today as when it was created.Bodily representation has shadowed Western art since the High Renaissance, particularly in the form of atlases of anatomical prints, detailed drawings, and wax cadavers used for teaching purposes. Studying anatomy was deemed so essential that it was part of the instruction program in the earliest Italian academies. Now contemporary artists interested in cultural constuctions of the body are reinvigorating the subject, with the fragmentation of human form being a prime concern.Since 1858, Gray's Anatomy has served to legitimize notions of "serious" science unchallenged by the frivolity of art. But in recent years a kind of rapprochement between medical history and cultural theory has occurred, and new medical technologies have become a wellspring for artists as well as for doctors. As The Quick and the Dead makes clear, the human bodysymbolic and intimate, material and sacredis a vital cultural resource and a site where various social constituencies find relevant meaning.

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