Abrir para comprenderdisecciones anatómicas en libros medievales

Zusammenfassung

This article is concerned with depictions of anatomical dissection in medieval books. It includes a series of particularly important examples. Most depictions of dissection known in the west were made in the Late Middle Ages and they are associated in the main with two types of book: medical treatises on surgery and works inspired by Roman Antiquity. The scarcity of examples dating from before this period is due to the fact that dissection fell out of fashion as a medical procedure between the second and the thirteenth centuries both in Latin Europe and in the Arabic Mediterranean. The absence of artistic representations of dissection thus parallels the absence of any documentary evidence about it. Moreover, the examples of dissection in medieval manuscripts have been overshadowed in art history by those found in early modern printed books and engravings. Nevertheless medieval examples are essential to our understanding of later ones. Without an examination of late medieval manuscripts it is impossible to appreciate what was a revolutionary scientific and sociological phenomenon. This is why those early illustrations deserve to be studied and their importance recognised.