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Andrea Carlino, Books of the body: anatomical ritual and Renaissance learning, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C Tedeschi, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. xiv, 266, illus., 20.50 (0-226-09287-9).
This English translation of the original Italian version, entitled La fabbrica del corpo (1994), is substantially the same text, except that it now appears with an epilogue, bibliography and index. Carlino's enterprise is a bold one. When university dissections of human cadavers began in the fourteenth century, he asks, why wasn't anatomy freed from the authority of Galen? Why was dissection used chiefly for the purpose of verifying the authoritative texts of anatomy until Vesalius showed how it could be used to acquire knowledge about the human body? In framing the issue in these terms, Carlino prescinds from the traditional story of sixteenth-century anatomy and instead seeks to isolate the obstacles that prevented anatomy from advancing by means of dissection.
Chapter one deals with visual representations of dissection in early printed books. In the course of his commentary on a number of well-known illustrations, Carlino argues that university dissections were originally carried out with the primary intention of visually affirming the anatomy of antiquity. Illustrations of these formal public events depict theory (as represented by the master reading from the classical authorities) separated from practice (as represented by the dissector who cut open the body). From the early sixteenth century, however, these images were increasingly supplemented by depictions of less formal private dissections...