Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)

Katalógus / Catalogue - II. Venus Anatomica / Venus Anatomica - Horányi Ildikó: A női test az anatómiai ábrázolások tükrében / The Female Body in the Eight of Anatomical Representations

of its constitution and functions. The thinking based on antique Stoic philosophy claiming that man is the measure of every thought placed the transcendental relation between life and death at the centre of representing the body. In concord with the endeavours of art, it became the goal of anatomy to proceed from individual observation to norm, to ideal beauty. Anatomical illustrations became surcharged with the duality of life and death. On the one side, the bared carcass is alive; on the other, the artist shows, with thrilling naturalism, what the body becomes after death, giving an allegorical frame to the picture with its allusions to the wages of original sin via elements of the memento mori or contemplatio mundi. The depiction of the body became the symbol of human fate, and using the "symbols of death" already present in art earlier on, could also become the personification of death. Three major groups of the anatomical representations of the female body are worth differentiating between. The first group comprises the pictures that have the strongest symbolical allusions: they include the female figures of title pages and some introductory pictures in textbooks; women might appear as the subject of dissection in the theatrum anatomicum or as a sculptural figure, the counterpart of man traditionally located on the right in the border ornamentation of the title page. In the early anatomical theatre depictions, female corpses are more frequent than in later pictures; on the well-known title page of Vesalius's Fabrica, too, the subject of the demonstration is a female corpse. In the front pictures, the female figure could expose its layers beneath the surface, which was almost always the abdominal site. The woman can be interpreted as the figure symbolizing Mother Nature, referring to the revolutionary role anatomy played in the knowledge of nature. The theatrum anatomicum itself functioned as a symbolical space. Because of the penalised nature of the event, dissection often took place in front of the wider public, retaining this public character even later. In the 16th century the need arose to create an appropriate space for the demonstrations. As a result, the anatomical theatre of Padua was completed in 1595 and the one in Bologna in 1637. These theatres were to house the subsequent collections of natural history (for want of a better term) containing the anatomical preparations and demonstration aids accumulated for years (e.g. the Leiden anatomical theatre established in 1597). These collections were profane curiosities and the spectator could participate in a meditative experience by stealing a glimpse of the hidden secrets of nature through the sight of the human body. Hence, the theatrum anatomicum was the temple not only of science, but also of mysticism. In this environment, the female body exposed in its naked reality, creative motherhood in the mystery of life and death, is the symbol of nature. On the other hand, as Eve of the first couple, it alludes to death through original sin and at the same time to redemption, when the male figure is shown naked in a pair with it. Introducing the anatomical figures, the bodies of the first couple - perfect examples of the Golden Age - appear as the illustration of the forms and proportions of the human corporeal surface. Iconographically, they either clearly allude to Adam and Eve, or are clad in mythological disguise as David and Venus. Summing up the first thematic group of book covers and introductory plates, we can conclude that the female figures are restricted to the illustration of the body surface and abdominal dissections heavily laden with symbolical connotations. Also, they are far less frequent than the male figures. Not much change can be observed in the second thematic unit, the inner plates of anatomical works. While prior to Vesalius's Fabrica, in the works, say, of Ryff, Estienne or Da Carpi,

1 the women expose their internal organs sitting like ethereal goddesses on thrones, later they appear as torsos, or as half-length figures with shy smiles on their faces, showing only their abdominal sites. The other organs - bones, muscles and so on - were demonstrated almost exclusively on male corpses. The rare female figures are usually shown on the last pages of a book. The question arises as to why anatomy failed to discuss woman as a different biological sex despite the dissection of a number of female bodies. Is it conceivable that God's creation was male and female at the same time, with the feminine features only understood as external deviations without anatomy's differentiating the fundamental specificities of the two sexes? One of the researchers studying the historical interpretation of the concept of body, Thomas Laqueur,

2 concludes, after an analysis of the correlation between body and gender, that the categories of biological sex and social gender were not always so unambiguously differentiated in every age as they are today. The woman as a sharply different biological entity from man only took shape in the late 18th century without attaining full emancipation until the 20th. Although socially the sexes have always been differentiated hierarchically, the biological sexes were not separated. The woman was in practice taken for an imperfect form of man, without having a different sex; hence man and woman constituted one and the same sex. It was Galen who supplied the theoretical basis of unisexuality when he claimed in the 2nd century A.D. that the female and male genitals were structurally identical. In terms of humoral pathology - the study of interchanging