<i>Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550 Minta Collins Jean A. GivensKaren M. ReedsAlain Touwaide, eds. Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550. AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science and Art, vol. 5. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006. xx + 278 pp. Ill. $99.95 (ISBN-10: 0-7546-5296-3; ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5296-0). Nine papers, derived from sessions at the 2003 International Congress for Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo and at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, include a general discussion of medieval images associated with medicine; six studies of illustrations in manuscript herbals, health, and natural science books; and essays on Leonardo’s anatomical studies and on his and other artists’ application of Galen’s theory of humors in sixteenth-century painting. The approach is primarily art-historical, but the valuable, detailed, and up-to-date bibliographical notes are widely interdisciplinary. This immaculately edited assembly of recent research, reviewed and reinterpreted, leads to some unexpected and thought-provoking conclusions. Peter Murray Jones typifies this in an essay in which he “eschews anachronisitic assumptions about medical illustrations” (p. 1), pointing out that there were no [End Page 704] professional medical illustrators in the Middle Ages and that illustrations did not necessarily relate to or enhance the text. He examines the different types and roles of various medically associated images in a wide range of media. Herbals and surgical texts are those most often illustrated with practical drawings, because in both cases the archetypes of the treatises were habitually illustrated. Such continuity is highlighted in Alain Touwaide’s meticulous study of an early fourteenth-century manuscript herbal. He proves that the illustrations are based on those in two early Byzantine Dioscorides’ codices, models for an archetype which he presumes was “probably” made during the period of Western occupation of Constantinople (1204–61). Jean A. Givens’s comparison of the earliest Tractatus de herbis manuscript with the fifteenth-century French translation, Livre des simples médecines, and the first English printed version, the Grete Herball, highlights the continuity of the illustrative tradition in herbals. However, her concern here is the ways in which text, page design, and navigational tools were reworked over time to facilitate the looking up of information for a changing readership. Karen M. Reeds’s examination of nature prints as another solution to the problem of picturing plants in the late fifteenth century draws attention to Leonardo’s attitude toward contemporary methods of representing plants. Claudia Swan, in her discussion of why early modern botanical treatises were illustrated, comments on the disjunction between the continuity of texts which still “depend on classical authority,” and the modernity of the pictures, the result of the “new practices of observation and demonstration” (p. 244). She does not develop the idea that the tradition of images in manuscript herbals may have been as deeply ingrained as the perpetuating of the ancient texts and the comparatively little-changing physical aspect of the books. Herbal illustrations predominate in the “tables of health,” the Tacuinum Sanitatis, produced in Lombardy for the Visconti court circa 1380–1400. Cathleen Hoeniger analyzes the sources for other, innovative, pictorial genres in these prestigious books, created for elite patrons for gifts and display. (She claims that no models existed in the herbal repertoire for recently introduced vegetables or fruit and that they may have been drawn from first-hand knowledge. However, images of those plants—eggplants, gourds, gherkins, and melons—all feature, observed from nature, in Tractatus de herbis manuscripts of ca. 1300–30.) A patron’s intervention can be seen in the distinguished manuscript of another text held in high esteem throughout the Middle Ages, Pliny’s Natural History, made for Pico della Mirandola. According to Sarah Blake McHam the images do not follow the standardized “scientific” repertory established in previous copies but illustrate anecdotes in the text, alluding to Greek and Roman culture, which had a personal appeal for Pico. The traditional idea of Leonardo as the isolated genius conducting secretive dissections is disproved in a fascinating essay by Monica Azzolini. Establishing that public autopsy and private dissection were common features of medical practice in Italy by...