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Art has always interested scientists, and scholars of medicine and science have often discovered scientific likenesses and symbols in artworks and paintings, as recently revealed, for example in the book The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
The art of Michelangelo has not escaped such analysis and, among his most well known masterpieces, the paintings in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City have been the subject of much interest over time. A particular portion of the painting, 'the touch' between God and Adam, has been widely reproduced for cultural and commercial purposes.
We recently had the opportunity to visit the restored Sistine Chapel and we were astonished by the richness and splendor of the frescoes, which reveal the genius of Michelangelo and other Italian painters of the 16th century. We were struck by the central ceiling painting, the renowned Creation of Adam (Figure 1), and looking 'through' the painting, we saw something we considered worthy of investigation: an evident obstetric symbolism. We know that others have identified the profile of human organs in the paintings of Michelangelo and especially in this 'birth'; for example, the profile of the brain [1] and, more recently, lungs [2]. However, we disagree with such views and interpretations. Given that Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint an ideal birth, we find our obstetric analogy far more convincing and worthy of investigation.
Maybe we are prejudiced by our medical backgrounds (I am a gynecologist, and my wife works on the molecular biology of placental enzymes), but we have seen, without doubt, that Adam is born (created) from a uterus and a human placenta. We will discuss the reasons for our strong feelings in terms of shapes, colors, and hidden meanings.
The choir of angels resembles the placenta (maternal surface). The distribution of the heads and the colors are the same as the cotyledons of the placenta (Figure 2).
The two arms that intersect - the right arm of God, together with the left arm of Adam - recall the umbilical cord in shape and color, with the muscle torsion of the arms reproducing the torsion of umbilical arteries around the vein (Figure 3). The anatomic proportion of this 'umbilical cord' to the placenta is perfectly maintained.
It is also possible...