For centuries the body was perceived as a closed entity, finely shaped on the outside but filled with mysterious and inaccessible matter on the inside. As anatomical studies developed, the first human dissections – conducted under the supervision of surgeons – finally brought these mysterious inner organs to light. They were however still charged with powerful symbolical and mythological connotations, some of which are hard to decipher even today. The ideal visual tool embodied by anatomical atlases was the first step towards establishing an internal order within the human body, in an attempt to rationalise the “shapeless” – that maelstrom interior of the body which should remain hidden, because once revealed it would demystified the wondrous human fabrica to mere corruptible matter.

The uterus, and indeed all the female reproductive organs, became an obsessive object of study for physicians, who immediately longed to learn the secrets of foetal development. Believed by the ancients to be an organ which wandered within the abdomen, akin to “a creature of a most erratic and bizarre nature” (Aretaeus of Cappadocia), the uterus was the organ which more than any other qualified the female anatomical body. For two millennia the dominant thought considered woman to be an inversion of man – the uterus was the scrotum, the ovaries the testicles, the vulva the foreskin, the vagina the penis. To this day, the image and notions associated with the female reproductive organs are sometimes charged with zoomorphic, threatening overtones (the vagina has been identified with the mouth of Medusa). Menstruation remains a taboo, wreathed in mystery, possibly on account of it being the only blatant evidence of the cycle of life and death.

The greatest flourishing of medical and scientific studies concerning the anatomical intus took place in the early years of the Seventeenth Century. A new and revolutionary approach to the biological body, the source of all passion and sensitivity – which at the time was regarded as the body’s chief function – was located in organs such as the heart or the circulatory apparatus. At the same time, the newly reformed Roman Catholic Church expressed an interest in anatomical knowledge, providing a new and unexpected drive in favour of artists studying the subject. In their works, anatomy was raised to the rank of divine revelation modelled in human form – no longer an exterior manifestation but now very much concerned with the interior. In his Spiritual Exercises, for example, Ignatius of Loyola advocates contemplation of the wounds of Christ on the Cross, particularly the spear to his side from which blood and water flow. He imagines them as mouth-like apertures connecting the exterior surface with the internal organs and allowing the believer to catch a glimpse of the Saviour’s heart, the source of eternal life.

With the power of their imagination, artists now had the key to depicting the shapeless. Anatomical drawing became the privileged instrument for reassembling the apparent disorder of phenomena into a superior unity, certifying the superiority of artistic intuition over the logical procedures of science. The anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci were, for artists, the very first opportunity to gaze into a living body, thanks to the invention of the “transparent body” where the inner workings were shown as they were taking place. This was artistic representation at the height of its power – the anatomical drawing was no longer drawing science, it was making it.

It later fell to those fertile artists – to borrow a term used by Nietzsche – able to tap into their feelings, to approach the expressivity of intestines and guts and all that comes from there, in search of a secret door into the splendour and indescribable beauty of the world. (al)