illustrator. From the point of view of content, anatomists’ attention to specific organs (as in Eustachius’s work) was confirmed, and as regarded visual language, so was their trust in engraving. Also belonging to this line of inquiry de animalibus was the work of the English physician William Harvey (also trained at the University of Padua), who in his Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals), published in Frankfurt in 1628, finally succeeded in explaining the circulation of the blood. What happened, during the course of the sixteenth century, to the artistanatomists? Their number increased, but the relationship between art and anatomy never regained the stature it had enjoyed with Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. There was a divergence. Artistic activity, often quite mediocre, was overwhelmed by the intense anatomical research of artists and (especially toward the end of the century) by their theoretical and scholarly interest in the human figure. This was the era of the artist-scholars, who were occasionally the authors of didactic texts, and anatomy itself became an established part of the curriculum in art academies. Contemporary artists and scholars were immediately aware of this state of affairs. Giorgio Vasari judged the nudes painted by Battista Franco, a Venetian artist who lived for many years in Rome, “di maniera cruda” and graceless in manner,
36. The arterial tree of the horse. Woodcut in Carlo Ruini (1530– 1598), Anatomia del cavallo, infer mità et suoi rimedii . . . , printed in Venice by Gasparo Bindoni il Giovane in 1602, vol. 1, p. 285. Book: 13 x 9 in. (33.1 x 23 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1947 (47.144) 37. The human arterial tree. Woodcut in Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1st ed. 1543), printed in Basel by Johannes Oporinus in 1555, p. 483. Book: 151/2 x 101/2 in. (39.5 x 26.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Dr. Alfred E. Cohn, in honor of William M. Ivins Jr., 1953 (53.682)
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