Imagine a theater. Not the modern movie theater but a temporary wooden theater constructed outside with a dissection table in the middle. And not a quiet, docile audience but a large and unruly male audience eagerly awaiting a spectacle. You are confronted by the smells of a decomposing body and the gruesome sight of the secrets that it holds. The actors include Andreas Vesalius, the 16th century anatomist, grave-robber, and performer, and the unclothed cadaver of an executed female criminal. This sets the stage for the public dissection that is illustrated on the titlepage of Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem.[1]

The properly functioning human body is opaque, superficial, and denies us access to it. Only when a body disfunctions are we able to look deeper to access the secrets it holds. In the Renaissance theater of anatomy, the body as human ceased to exist and the body as the subject of study arose.[2] In this setting, anatomists were given the power to reveal the inner mysteries of the body. This was doubly true of women’s bodies which were viewed as uncharted terrain.[3] Anatomists saw it as their duty to discover the secrets of women, which was embodied in the female reproductive organs. The secrets embodied in the female reproductive organs was a microcosm that came to represent women’s secrets as a whole.

Vesalius is offering these secrets to his male readership by displaying the cut open womb of the female cadaver in his titlepage. Vesalius also highlights the emptiness of the womb, the un-pregnant state of the female body. This emptiness is meant to convey a lack of identity, a sense of meaninglessness of the empty uterus. With this one body, he is capturing the imagination of how knowledge about any female body may be known. As a result, anatomy transformed the secrets of women from something that could classically only be understood by other women to something that demanded study.[4]

However, just because the body is open to be seen doesn’t mean that it is understood. The anatomical body does not convey the natural fact of structure. Rather, the body is taken apart with dissection and then reconstructed from its constituent parts by the anatomist.[5]This process is mediated by vision, the primary sense that was used by anatomists to gather knowledge. Vision, however, is a deeply flawed sense that can be influenced by one’s habitus which includes ideology and preconceived notions.[6]

Vesalius was influenced by Galenic humoural tradition, in which women had cold humours. Women’s lack of heat lead to reproductive organs that were an internalized, imperfect, and mutilated version of what men possessed. In contrast, men possessed excess heat which perfected their reproductive organs. Vesalius similar to Galen was phallocentric, meaning that he sought to reconstruct the female body in a male image.

In attempting to reconstruct the female body in the male image, Vesalius was more interested in emphasizing female inferiority and weakness rather than accurately observing the body.[7] Vesalius was also constructing the body in the sense that the epistemological endeavor of anatomy was closely linked to aesthetic values. In fact, the Fabrica is the product of collaboration between Vesalius and the artists in Titian’s studio.[8] Many of Vesalius’s illustrations were also composite images drawn from multiple female bodies and even based on animal reproductive organs.

All of this leads one to question if the anatomical body even exists if it is fabricated?

The female subject of study was also an object of desire that was objectified by the male gaze. The female cadaver on Vesalius’s titlepage is surrounded by an unruly male audience. The female body is passive while the male audience is active. The men have individual agency and authority since they have the right to see, while the female body merely serves as a source of information.

The male gaze also serves as a form of surveillance and control over the bodies of women. In this way, knowledge is almost weaponized as knowing the female body is equivalent to controlling it. In addition, the cadaver is positioned in a way that draws attention to the genitals, emphasizing the visual and sexual impact of the illustration. In fact, the positioning is reminiscent of contemporary erotic prints. All of this seeks to draw the viewer closer into the illustration, minimizing the distance between the viewer and viewed.[9]

The male gaze is also connected to the medical gaze which treats bodies as the “dehumanized objects of observation.”[10] This is emphasized by the fact that almost nothing is known about the female cadaver on Vesalius’s titlepage, only that she was executed for an unspecified crime.[11] However, the body is neither a subject nor object but rather self-encompassing. By treating the body as an object, the humanity it encompasses ceases to exist. It almost vanishes.

 

Works Cited

[1] Vesalius, Andreas. “Titlepage.” De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, edited by Johann Oporinus, Per Ioannem Opporinum, 1543.

[2] Wilson, Luke. “William Harvey’s Prelectiones: The Performance of the Body in the Renaissance Theater of Anatomy.” Representations, no. 17, 1987, pp. 62–95.

[3] Waldby, Cathy. “Theaters of Violence: The anatomical sacrifice and the anatomical trace.” The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. pp. 63-66

[4] Park, Katharine. “The Empire of Anatomy.” Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection, Zone Books, 2010.

[5] Wilson, Luke. “William Harvey’s Prelectiones: The Performance of the Body in the Renaissance Theater of Anatomy.”

[6] Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Paperback ed. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2010.

[7] Schiebinger, Londa. “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy.” Representations, no. 14, 1986, pp. 42–82.

[8] Lacey, Sharon. “Artistic Influences on Andreas Vesalius’s ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem’ and Its Influence on the Arts in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Doctus Artifex, 31 May 2012.

[9] Park, Katharine. “The Empire of Anatomy.”

[10] Friz, Amanda M., and Marissa L. Fernholz. “The Male Gaze in the Medical Classroom: Proximity, Objectivity, and Objectification in ‘The Pornographic Anatomy Book.’” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 43, no. 3, July 2020, pp. 292–316.

[11] Park, Katharine. “The Empire of Anatomy.”