Visual Arts and Medicine in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: A Collection of Essays and Sources - Hardcover

by Robert Brennan (Editor), Fabian Jonietz (Editor), Romana Sammern (Editor)

This book opens up new perspectives on the relationship between art, medicine, and science in late-medieval and early modern Europe. Looking beyond the traditional nexus of art, anatomy, and optics, the volume sheds light on a broader array of connections between artists and physicians: collaborations between painters and doctors on colour charts, handwork skills common to sculptors and surgeons, the transmission of art theory through medical texts long before the emergence of art writing itself as an independent genre, and the kinship of medical diagnosis with early modes of connoisseurship. Reconfiguring the histories of art, medicine, and science, the book also traverses conventional boundaries between physical and mental health, religious and medical modes of healing, menial and exalted forms of knowledge and labour, as well as vernacular and scientific understandings of human difference, including gender, race, and neurodiversity.

Back Jacket

This book looks beyond the traditional nexus of painting, anatomy, and optics to explore a wider, more complex network of material, institutional, and theoretical connections between visual art and medicine in early modern Europe.

Focusing on the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries, the book sheds light on collaborations between painters and doctors on colour charts, handwork skills common to sculptors and surgeons, the transmission of art theory through medical texts long before the emergence of art writing itself as an independent genre, and the kinship of medical diagnosis with early modes of connoisseurship. On one level, the book proposes that visual art and medicine enjoyed a special degree of intertwinement, beyond the typical range of connections that bound the arts together in premodernity. On another level, it also demonstrates the relevance of this intertwinement to a range of pressing methodological concerns in current humanities scholarship, such as recent approaches to the history of the body, embodied knowledge, and transregional connectivity. Alongside nine chapters that explore these and other topics, the book also presents an array of little-known primary sources, translated into English from languages such as Latin, Italian, Polish, and Tibetan, along with introductions and commentary.

The aim of the book is not to offer a visual history of the medical profession, nor to chronicle the role that medical illustration has played in art history, but rather to reconsider the broader social and epistemological standing of both disciplines.

Author Biography

Robert Brennan is Lecturer in in Italian Art, c. 1300-1500 at the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London

Fabian Jonietz is a scholar at the Central Institute for Art History, Munich

Romana Sammern is a permanent postdoctoral scholar at the interuniversity organisation 'Arts & Knowledges' of the University of Salzburg/Mozarteum University