Visual arts and medicine in early modern Europe and beyond : Bernardino Ramazzini,

Abstract

This book looks beyond the traditional nexus of painting, anatomy, and optics to explore a wider, more complex network of material, institutional, and theoretical connections between visual art and medicine in early modern Europe. Focusing on the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries, the book sheds light on collaborations between painters and doctors on colour charts, handwork skills common to sculptors and surgeons, the transmission of art theory through medical texts long before the emergence of art writing itself as an independent genre, and the kinship of medical diagnosis with early modes of connoisseurship. On one level, the book proposes that visual art and medicine enjoyed a special degree of intertwinement, beyond the typical range of connections that bound the arts together in premodernity. On another level, it also demonstrates the relevance of this intertwinement to a range of pressing methodological concerns in current humanities scholarship, such as recent approaches to the history of the body, embodied knowledge, and transregional connectivity. Alongside nine chapters that explore these and other topics, the book also provides an array of little-known primary sources, translated into English from languages such as Latin, Italian, Polish, and Tibetan, along with introductions and commentary. The aim of the book is not to write a visual history of the medical profession, nor to chronicle the role that medical illustration has played in art history, but rather to rethink the broader social and epistemological standing of both disciplines.