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The painter and architect
Sebastiano Serlio and the physician and anatomist Andreas Vesalius
both lived and worked in the area of Venice and nearby Padua in
the 1530s. Both were associated with the circle of the Venetian
painter Titian (a group that included learned humanists and artisans),
and both made radically innovative use of visual images in their
respective disciplines of architecture and anatomy. A comparison
of two of their images, one of stones, the other of bones, reveals
many similarities.
The son of a leather
worker, Serlio trained as a painter, and began studying and measuring
ancient ruins during a stay in Rome. He worked there (perhaps in
the Vatican workshops) in the circle of the architect Bramante.
By 1527, he had moved to Venice where he was associated with the
poet and humanist Pietro Aretino (with whom he became good friends),
the painter Titian, and the architect Jacopo Sansovino. In Venice,
he devoted himself to creating his illustrated treatise, On
Architecture, which he published in installments. The first
installment, on the architectural orders, was published in 1537.
Serlio's books were immensely popular among practicing masons and
architects, as well as among humanists and scholars. Serlio illustrated
various elements of building structures.  For
example, in this illustration, he showed parts of various buildings
that he had drawn from observation: detail A, depicting a podium,
base and capital, are to be found in the Forum Borarium in Rome;
detail R is found outside Rome on a bridge over the Tiber, and detail
V is found above a triumphal arch in Verona. With Serlio's book
in hand, the practicing architect did not actually need to observe
the buildings and architectural elements to discern their workings,
but could instead copy them from the book and incorporate them into
buildings as he saw fit.
The illustration from
Vesalius's De Humani Corporis demonstrates a similar practicality
of purpose. Vesalius assembled bones from different parts of the
body.  He
also labeled them with letters that allow the reader to learn the
technical term for the part. The shading and style of the bones
are quite similar to the same elements in Serlio's architectural
parts. In fact, it is very likely that Vesalius saw Serlio's book
while he was working on his anatomical treatise. Vesalius used illustrations
as a way of narrowing the gap between university medical learning
and the artisanal practice of the surgeon and the apothecary, restoring,
in his view, the ancient splendor of medicine. Vesalius believed
that everyone should dissect in order to learn anatomy. However,
if they were unable, or did not have the stomach for it, they could
learn anatomy by studying his treatise instead. In a remarkable
defense of virtual witnessing, Vesalius told his readers that "pictures
of all the parts are incorporated into the text of the discourse,
so as virtually to set a dissected body before the eyes of students
of the work of Nature" (Vesalius, On the Fabric of the
Human Body, trans. Hart and Hicks, "To King Charles V,"
xlvii-xlix). Like Serlio's book on architecture, Vesalius's book
on human anatomy ironically spared the practitioner the necessity
of looking at the real thing. The student of anatomy could be a
"virtual witness" because of the closeness of a visual
representation to the structure itself.
Pamela O.
Long
Washington, DC
Suggested Reading
Dismoor, William Bell. "The Literary
Remains of Sebastiano Serlio." Art Bulletin 24 (March
1942): 55-91.
Kemp, Martin. "Temples of the body
and temples of the cosmos: vision and visualization in the Vesalian
and Copernican revolutions." In Picturing Knowledge:
Historical and philosophical problems concerning the use of art
in science, edited by Brian S. Baigrie, 40-85. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1966.
Long, Pamela O. "Objects of Art/Objects
of Nature: Visual Representation and the Representation of Nature."
In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early
Modern Europe, edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen,
63-82. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Long, Pamela O. Openness, Secrecy, Authorship:
Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to
the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001.
Payne, Alina A. The Architectural Treatise
in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament,
and Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999.
Serlio, Sebastiano. On Architecture.
Vol. 1, bk. 1-5, 'Tutte L'opere d'architettura et prospetiva,
translated by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996.
Vesalius, Andreas. On the Fabric
of the Human Body: A Translation of "De Humani Corporis Fabrica
Libri Septem. Book 1: The Bones and Cartilages and
Book 2: The Ligaments and Muscles. San Francisco: Norman,
1998-1999.
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