Violence and the Genesis of the Anatomical Image / / Rose Marie San Juan.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE Arts 2022
• VerfasserIn: San Juan, Rose Marie,
• Place / Publishing House: University Park, PA : : Penn State University Press, , [2022]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (238 p.)

Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confronts the question of violence in the making of the early modern anatomical image.Engaging the ways in which power operated in early modern anatomical images in Europe and, to a lesser extent, its colonies, San Juan examines literal violence upon bodies in a range of civic, religious, pedagogical, and “exploratory” contexts. She then works through the question of how bodies were thought to be constituted—systemic or piecemeal, singular or collective—and how gender determines this question of constitution. In confronting the issue of violence in the making of the anatomical image, San Juan explores not only how violence transformed the body into a powerful and troubling double but also how this kind of body permeated attempts to produce knowledge about the world at large.Provocative and challenging, this book will be of significant interest to scholars across fields in early modern studies, including art history and visual culture, science, and medicine.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Violence and the Image in Transition -- 1. Bodily Animation: Bones, Skulls, and Skeletons -- 2. Bodily Mutation: From Muscles to Flesh and Blood -- 3. Bones in Transit, Flesh in Shreds: Anatomy and the New World Cannibal -- 4. Between Face and Brain: Recalibrating the Head -- 5. The Rib Within: The Wax Model and the Violence of Embodiment -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index