ject attracting anatomists’ interest. This seems to have been the very point Giovanni Battista Armenini, another Renaissance writer, was making when, like Vasari, he reproached those artists who lost themselves “in the minutiae of nudes” and indulged in “great and lengthy disputes over the minutest of lines in anatomy.”33 In any case, as far as is known these artists were more the exception than the rule, and during the sixteenth century the detailed structure of the muscles and other anatomical structures were illustrated only in scientific treatises—an important sign of the divergence of scientists’ and artists’ interest in anatomy at the time. The drawings made by artists generally represent the muscles in an abbreviated fashion, without much detail. Some highly finished, self-sufficient drawings, apparently not destined for engraving, were executed with wash, a quasi-pictorial technique that grants little opportunity for individual detail. In the mid-sixteenth century the Aretine artist Bartolomeo Torri used wash to render muscles in a summary manner (fig. 42). Bartolomeo is another example of an artist-anatomist who was completely engulfed by research, and Vasari described him in much the same way he did Battista Franco. Bartolomeo left his native Arezzo early on for Rome; there he worked with the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, yet his mind was entirely absorbed with anatomical drawings— what Vasari called his “sporcherie della notomia” (filthy anatomy). He “kept so many limbs and pieces of men under his bed and all over his rooms, that they poisoned the whole house” and forced Clovio to turn him out, notwithstanding the youth’s promising talent. Torri died shortly thereafter in Arezzo, having persevered in his “usual studies and the same irregularities.”34 Unlike Battista Franco, whose more entrepreneurial spirit led him to consider the difficult but more promising market for printed images, Bartolomeo Torri apparently executed
40. Giovanni Battista Franco, called Il Semolei (Italian, Venice? 1510–1561 Venice), or copy after. Cranium and cervical column in profile. Pen and ink, 37/8 x 23/4 in. (9.9 x 6.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.326). This drawing is either one of the various preparatory drawings Battista made for the engraving in fig. 41 or a copy after it. 41. Battista Franco. Skeleton in profile and bones. Etching and engraving, 18 x 121/2 in. (45.8 x 31.8 cm). Albertina, Vienna (HB 3, Suppl., fol. 61,88 [Bartsch 69])
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