Sublimi anatomie is a voyage in the contemplation of the human body through the ages and across science and art. Ever since Antiquity, the history of anatomy has been accompanied by stupefaction at the discoveries brought to light by this discipline, from the body’s surface right into its most microscopic, hidden components.

In his oration on the life of Galen of Pergamon (130-210) – the physician who towered above medicine in both the western and Arab worlds at least until the Seventeenth Century -philosopher and theologian Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), one of the fathers of the Reformation, stated that “Anatomy is the beginning of Theology, the point of access of the anagnorisis of God”. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that many Renaissance anatomists regarded the study of “the wonderous composition of the human body” as a path to knowledge and “proof of divine omnipotence”. But anatomy was also knowledge of the self, an inspiration for individual and intimate reflection on our own being and destiny. The Socratic saying “know thyself” in fact crops up frequently on anatomical illustrations and treatises right up into the modern era. For the physicians, artists and philosophers living in those times (and not only) the body was, of all the world’s mirabilia, the uttermost object of contemplation and wonder.

The concept of the sublime, hitherto circumscribed to the act of contemplation, entered the anatomical lexicon relatively late. It was not until the 1840s that Peter Leopold of Lorraine instituted the professorship of “Anatomia Sublime e delle Regioni” at Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova hospital, which was assigned to the physician Filippo Pacini (1812-1883) in 1849. Pacini had occupied the professorship of “Anatomia Pittorica” at the city’s arts academy since 1847. As a subject, anatomy had been part of the curriculum of art students since the founding of the Accademia del Disegno by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in 1563 – and, just like in medicine faculties, it entailed the practice of human dissection. The title of Pacini’s professorship indicates the extent to which the notion of the sublime had circulated in artistic and philosophical circles over the course of the Nineteenth Century. Developed as a concept in the works of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the sublime was in line with the sensitivity of many artists active within the context of Romanticism. In tandem with the ongoing debate on the difference between Beauty and Sublime, both the art and the philosophy of the time interpreted it somewhat drastically to be “the horrific which fascinates” or “the terror which produces the strongest emotion we are capable of feeling”, or even as a “the power and vastness of an object which could destroy its observer”. The bodies, the corpses, the dissections, the dismemberments all contributed to heroically emphasise this dramatic interpretation of the sublime and how it was perceived.

As a notion, however, the sublime intended as an expression of wonder at the human body experienced by physicians, artists and philosophers in the Renaissance and the Baroque, came considerably earlier and from further afield. The earliest text in which it appears is a work on aesthetics, more precisely on rhetoric, dating from the First Century and entitled On the Sublime. The author is uncertain and is often designated as Pseudo-Longinus, or referred to simply as the Anonymous of the Sublime. Like others who came after him, he considered the Sublime to be more powerful than the Beautiful, offering as an example its persuasive (and therefore positive) effectiveness in rhetoric: “the Sublime transports listeners not to persuasion but to ecstasy, because that which is marvellous is always accompanied by a feeling of disorientation and prevails over that which is merely convincing or gracious, granting the speech a power and a strength which are invincible and overcome any listener”.

The sublime is therefore akin to a “lightning bolt” enabling those who perceive it to come closer to God and the Self. The contents of this exhibition, be they the work of artists, scientists or craftsmen operating on dead or living bodies, in the past as well as today, have taken up the challenge of the sublime as the path to knowledge. (ac)