Medical competence, anatomy and the polity in seventeenth-century Rome.
At the centre of this article are two physicians active in Rome between 1600 and 1630 who combined medical practice with broader involvement in the dynamic cultural, economic and political scene of the centre of the Catholic world. The city's distinctive and very influential social landscape magnified issues of career-building and allows us to recapture physicians’ different strategies of self-fashioning at a time of major social and religious reorganization. At one level, reconstructing Johannes Faber and Giulio Mancini's medical education, arrival in Rome and overlapping but different career trajectories contributes to research on physicians’ identity in early modern Italian states. Most remarkable are their access to different segments of Roman society, including a dynamic art market, and their diplomatic and political role, claimed as well as real. But following these physicians from hospitals to courts, including that of the Pope, and from tribunals to the university and analysing the wide range of their writing – from medico-legal consilia to political essays and reports of anatomical investigations – also enriches our view of medical practice, which included, but went beyond, the bedside. Furthermore, their activities demand that we reassess the complex place of anatomical investigations in a courtly society, and start recovering the fundamental role played by hospitals – those quintessential Catholic institutions – as sites of routine dissections for both medical teaching and research. (pp. 551–567)
Caravaggio's Coroner: Forensic Medicine in Giulio Mancini's Art Criticism
The numerous fantasies prompted by Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin have made strange bedfellows (Fig. 1). In his 1986 film Caravaggio, Derek Jarman produced a tableau vivant with a drowned woman posing as the Virgin Mary. By imagining the artist's practice as the passive rendering of a fully constituted set-piece, Jarman owes as much to Caravaggio's seventeenth-century critics and classical theorists as he does to the Hollywood artist bio-pic. Indeed, well before Vincente Minelli's staging of Montmartre in his American in Paris, Caravaggio's first biographers Giovanni Baglione and Giovan Pietro Bellori both imagined seeing the painting as a staged scene, in which the artist passively yielded his brush to the depiction of the bare leg of a bloated Madonna.1 These seventeenthcentury critics transformed a figure traditionally intended to defy putrefaction and disintegration into a swollen dead body and an exposed corrupt member. To describe the Virgin as gonfia bloated implies a distended contour, an expanding volumetric surface responding to an unseen internal pressure. The critics' account of this anatomical process is ambiguous. Swollenness can be attributed to pathological causation or, alternatively, to decay subsequent to death. The swollen body is either a symptom or forensic evidence. Whether the woman's body is a pathological or post-mortem specimen, the symbol of chastity and purity underwent a transformation into base materiality. There are no roses, nor perfume. The celestial transitus has been abruptly arrested. This characterisation of Caravaggio's realist project is well known. Yet it is difficult to attribute this description of the Virgin Mary's body to the figure in the painting. Perhaps the critics saw a swollen body because swollenness offered a way of describing a weighted corporeality that undermined the seamless elevation of the Virgin from the world of the flesh to that of the spirit in death. Indeed, Caravaggio's picture betrays a tension between a weighted body and its ascendance. Not much of the body is actually exposed but what is shown is grimly burdened by the pressures of physical weight: a bluntly handled set of feet and ankles joined at the heels; on the chest, a hand with strangely, disarrayed and interwoven fingers; another limp elongated hand bent at the wrist, divided by shadow; and a tilted face whose chin multiplies as folds of her neck. This woman is weighted; she succumbs to gravity. Surely, Caravaggio offers us an unusually materialist rendition unflinchingly interested in particularities like the folds of a neck. And the paint's dry thickness does not help matters (drier, scratchier than Courbet's but sharing its inertness). Nevertheless, the critics' focus on the Virgin forgets that her body is part of a larger pictorial system that bears considerable responsibility for the picture's effect. Much of the canvas's peculiarity arises not from the Virgin's body, but from its compositional anomalies. Repeating the colour of the Virgin's dress, the enormous swath of red drapery may mean to imply an upward movement, but it is far too 1. Giovanni Baglione, Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572 in fino a' tempi di Papa Urbano Ottavo nel 1642, V. Mariani (ed.), facsimile of the 1642 edition (Rome, 1935), p. 138. Giovanni Pietro Bellori,
The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine
Preface and Acknowledgments Ch. 2Practitioner and Patients Pt. 2Theory and Practice Ch. 4Time, Body, Food: The Parameters of Health Pt. 3The Old and the New Ch. 6The New Hippocrates Pt. 4Medical Wonders Ch. 8The Medicine of Dreams Pt. 5Medical Narratives Ch. 10The Physician as Patient Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index