Curating the Renaissance body

Abstract

There were only a few traditional visual notations for illness in the late sixteenth century. The mortally ill patient lay in bcd, gaunt cheekbones and sometimes exposed ribcage testimony to the debilitating effects of loss of appetite; at the bedside a woman poised a hopeful spoon over a bowl of soup. In ex voto paintings and in manuals made to help people to a better death relatives consolidated around the bed or knelt to pray. Up to the late sixteenth century physicians were generally shown judging the rhythm of a pulse or the color of urine in a transparent flask, while medical scholars and anatomists presided over opened cadavers. In medical treatises only midwives and barber-surgeons were regularly portrayed as actively engaged with the suffering human body, the midwives supporting and delivering the laboring mother, the barber-surgeons setting bones, sawing off limbs, and in general striking terror in any patient imagined in that position.1 This essay is about the problems of representing bodies in meaningful and demonstrative interaction in situations for which there is no easily recognizable visual tradition. In cases like this, the authors and publishers who added images to their texts had to be as concerned with limiting the signification of the pictures as with extending the meaning of the text. The Discorsi di Pietro Paolo Magni Piacentino sopra.