A flayed cadaver holds his skin in one hand and a dissecting knife in the other. The skin’s distorted face has the appearance of a ghost or a cloud, suggesting that spirit has been separated from, or peeled off the fleshy inner man.

Anatomical representation makes the insides of our bodies visible and familiar, but also reveals a strangeness, an otherness. In dramatizing the dissected body, Vesalius contributed to a new visual iconography of monstrosity.

Early modern representations of the anatomical body took death head-on: the dead mocked the living; the living mocked the dead. The cadaver was an effigy of social types—the courtier, the flirt. Anatomy cited, parodied, or augmented long-established iconic traditions. This dissected figure evokes a distinctive pose—a not-so-subtle flirtation.

Fascination with the interior of the body goes back to the dawn of humanity.

This illustrated treatise on human anatomy consists of an introduction, five chapters on the five systems (bones, nerves, muscles, veins, and arteries) and a conclusion on the compound organs and embryology. This pre-modern manuscript is one of the first systematic works on human anatomy.

Berengario, an Italian surgeon and physician, refashioned the 14th-century anatomical treatise of Mondino de’Liuzzi for print publication. The illustrations give little anatomical detail, but visually represent the sense of wonder that attends the opening of the body.

This illustration from a Hebrew encyclopedia pairs the interior of a human interior with the interior of a house, a visual metaphor: the organs, like rooms in a house, have different functions. Kats, one of the first Jews to study medicine at a German university, completed his degree at Padua and served as a court physician to the Ottoman Sultan.

Berengario, who is said to have dissected hundreds of bodies, here presents and comments on the anatomy of Galen (ca. 130–ca. 200 A.D.), Mondino de’Liuzzi (d. 1326) and others. The crude, anatomically inaccurate illustrations borrow liberally from medieval death iconography.

Dryander, a German professor of anatomy, revised the works of Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (ca.1460–ca.1530) and Mondino de’Liuzzi (d. 1326). Here, a torso serves as an anatomical coat of arms. The phrase "INEVITABILE FATUM" (inevitable fate) links the illustration to the iconography of death: the dissected body and skeleton remind us of our mortality.

Draped over a table, an anatomical figure displays a cross-section of his brain while touching a frame that holds captions. In the background, spectators observe from atop a fanciful parapet. To cut costs, Estienne took some of his illustrations from non-anatomical books, replacing a section of the woodblock with an insert that depicted the body's interior. In this figure, the boundary of the insert is seen in a square around the head.

The anatomical figure sits on a fanciful throne, with a leg casually propped up on the framed caption. In the upper left, a solitary figure looks on from atop a parapet. To cut costs, Estienne took some of his illustrations from non-anatomical books, replacing a section of the woodblock with an insert that depicted the body's interior. In this female figure, the boundary of the insert is revealed by a faint white line under her left arm.

A skeleton with a thin covering of tendons poses before an apocalyptic sky.

Vesalius dissects a cadaver in the center of a crowded anatomical theater, while Death hovers over the scene. Before De Fabrica (1543), depictions of dissection had the anatomist presiding at some distance from the cadaver, while lower ranking barber-surgeons did the dirty work of dissecting.

The only known first-hand likeness of Vesalius shows the formally attired anatomist grasping the dissected arm of a cadaver. Vesalius’s head is disproportionately large compared to his body, but the cadaver is larger still—leading to speculation that the engraver pulled the composition together from several sources.

A ruined body leans against ancient ruins, a metaphoric echo. Here, visual metaphor coexists with a commitment to accurate naturalist depiction.

Vesalius collected and presented his findings in De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), a book of more than 600 pages, with beautifully detailed woodcuts by artists from the workshop of Titian. The illustrations set a new standard for accuracy, while drawing on a variety of contemporary genres of visual representation: naturalism, classicism, metaphor, landscape, death imagery and monstrosity.

Juan Valverde de Amusco studied with Realdo Columbo, Vesalius’s pupil and successor. His Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (1556) was the first anatomy published in Spanish. Valverde used Vesalius’s work as a departure for his own anatomical visions, which humorously played on identifications of self and other, and matter and spirit.

Valverde playfully shows the viscera dissected not just through skin, but through a suit of Roman armor. The free-floating body parts on the right are copied from Vesalius.

Ruysch was the first great exponent of the anatomical specimen. Visitors from all over Europe came to marvel at his "repository of curiosities." As Amsterdam’s chief instructor of midwives and "legal doctor" to the court, Ruysch had ample access to the bodies of stillborns and dead infants and used them to create extraordinary multi-specimen scenes. In making such displays, he claimed an extraordinary privilege: the right to collect and exhibit human material without the consent of the anatomized.

Ruysch festooned infant skeletons with various objects, organic and non-organic, and arranged them in landscapes of body parts.

Ruysch’s "repository of curiosities" included displays of infant and fetal skeletons, placed in landscapes of human and animal body parts. This ghastly musicale is notable for its morbid whimsy.

Early modern anatomical illustrations and objects operated in multiple meanings and served multiple functions. The anatomist studied dissected cadavers and enjoyed manipulating and presenting them; readers and viewers studied dissected cadavers and enjoyed looking. This convergence of work and play, this multiplicity of function and meaning, was not problematic.

Some of Casserio’s plates stage a not-so-subtle flirtation. Here, the model coyly hides behind a veil of his own body tissue as he bares his innards.

The plates for Casserio’s theatrum anatomicum were printed after his death in works attributed to him and his pupil Adriaan van Spiegel (1578–1625). Here, a pregnant woman is dissected so that the flaps resemble petals of a flower, with the baby at the center.

Dressed in bonnets, sashes and undressed down to skin and layers beneath Casserio’s figures have the look of everyday people: peddlers, farmwives, artisans, laborers—an attempt at realism with a hint of comic exaggeration.

Around 1618, Berrettini made a series of extraordinary drawings that were later forgotten and only printed in 1741. The figures are emphatic anatomical entertainers who solicit attention with aggressive body language.

A skeleton dances a lively step, while in the background an arrangement of bones float in the air. Berrettini’s exuberant flourishes take their cue from the theatrics of baroque drama and court entertainments.

Sporting a stylish hairdo of cascading curls, anatomist and author John Browne presides over a fanciful anatomy lesson.

Artists did not just record anatomical reality: they dramatized, travestied, beautified, and moralized it. In the time of Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), and for centuries after, the only legal source of bodies was the gallows. This was insufficient to meet the needs of anatomists, who often stole bodies from burial grounds. But the public regarded grave robbery and dissection as an insult to funerary honor and defended their dead—the dissection of bodies carried a stigma. Families and neighbors stood vigil over the dead and battled body snatchers. Anatomists, therefore, tended to take their subjects from the least powerful people—convicts, prostitutes, the poor.

Browne’s figures dance and posture with theatrical gestures. Here, a seductive coquette flirtatiously displays her musculature.

The figure of an anatomized courtier languorously postures atop an absurd pedestal. The overall effect is travesty.

The gulf between illustration and real life was vast. In reality, the nobility and gentry were protected from dissection—anatomists used the bodies of criminals, outcasts, and the poor. Illustrators typically suppressed these social origins, but in John Browne’s anatomy the despised lower-class cadaver is perversely transformed into a high-born courtier.

Braune’s atlas is notable for its beautiful color, harmonious composition, and extensive use of frozen cross-sections.

An eminent anatomist and obstetrician, Hunter, confined himself to a specific topic (late pregnancy) and "subject" (the dissection of a woman who died near the end of term). Hunter argued illustrations that represent only "what was actually seen," will carry "the mark of truth" and be "almost as infallible as the object itself."

This stark dissection—with ragged flesh fully displayed and hands bound with a cord—signals a commitment to a higher level of realism. To our eyes, the picture may suggest a distressing indifference to, or even pleasure in, human suffering.

Albinus, professor of anatomy at Leiden, proposed in the 1720s to make the most detailed, beautiful, and comprehensive anatomical atlas ever published, using stylized figures representing an ideal humanity. He never completed the project, but did finish a part, Tabulae Sceleti e Musculorum Corporis Humani (1747)—the last great medical anatomy to use imaginative elements.

Albinus intended his figures to exemplify ideal humanity and an ideal of anatomical illustration. The cadaver, carefully chosen for its close approximation to classical ideals of proportion, stands with a guardian angel hovering behind against a painterly backdrop.

Wandelaar’s backgrounds are intended to be both beautiful and poetically evocative, a meditation on nature and mortality that complements the idealized figure of humanity.

According to Albinus, the poetically evocative backdrops were designed to "agreeably" fill "the empty spaces" and make the figure look three-dimensional. Later editions omit the backgrounds, a concession to the movement.

In an attempt to increase the scientific accuracy of anatomical illustration, Albinus and Wandelaar devised a new technique of placing nets with square webbing at specified intervals between the artist and the anatomical specimen and copying the images using the grid patterns. Tabulae was highly criticized, especially for the whimsical backgrounds added to many of the pieces by Wandelaar, but Albinus staunchly defended Wandelaar and his work.

D’Agoty’s colored mezzotints have a painterly quality. This pregnant woman calmly looks back at the viewer, a characteristic pose of 18th-century French portraiture.

Gautier d’Agoty perfected a method of printing colored layers of mezzotint (a technique that allows for subtle gradations of shading). The resultant anatomical illustrations look like paintings on a page, and are remarkable for their brilliance, gaiety, eccentricity, delicacy, and (paradoxically) crudity.

D’Agoty’s large plates can be pasted together to form life-size figures.

As a subject, anatomy was particularly well suited to display Gautier d’Agoty’s mastery of advanced print technology. It also gave him license to show parts of the body not permitted in other genres of illustration. The aim was to dazzle more than to instruct.

The grotesquerie of subject matter, stiffness of the figure, and eccentric arrangement of body parts make for a characteristic dreaminess that eerily anticipates 20th-century modernism.

The mutilation of the dissected face, and depiction of the nails and pins that serve as prosthetic aids to anatomical study, demonstrate Bidloo’s unsparing anatomical realism.

On some pages, de Lairesse commingles body parts with objects taken from everyday life, a variation on the still life, a popular genre of northern European painting that often contained skulls and other allusions to human mortality.

Bidloo’s anatomy represents a transitional stage. Alongside harshly realistic illustrations, he offers a few memento mori (reminders of mortality).

Bell criticized "the subjection of true anatomical drawing to the capricious interference of the artist, whose rule it has too often been to make all beautiful and smooth, leaving no harshness…." His own drawings and etchings are notably harsh.

Mascagni’s great anatomical atlas was published only after his death. A lithographic 1826 edition claims Corsican anatomist Francesco Antommarchi (Napoleon’s personal physician, and Mascagni’s sometime collaborator) as the sole author. But scholars recognized the searingly bright colors and stylized grotesquerie of the figures as the distinctive work of Mascagni.

In the omission of background, and intense, even excessive, use of color, Mascagni’s plates exemplify the new free-floating style of anatomical representation. The rendering of dissected "flaps," however, harkens back to an older style.

Mascagni developed new methods of anatomical preservation, made important contributions to the understanding of human lymphatics, and produced a comprehensive and unprecedented series of brilliantly colored, oversized, anatomical plates.

Sibson argued that anatomical illustrations are misleading because preservative injections and the dissection itself change the relative position of parts. This double illustration is intended to show a true picture of the dead body alongside an imaginative reconstruction of the same interior in a living body.

Subdued color and shading, and masterful composition, lend the dissected body and prosthetics of dissection a serene beauty.

Sarlandière, an enthusiastic practitioner of electromagnetic therapy and phrenology, and a follower of the utopian socialist Saint-Simon, argued that public education in anatomy would further the progressive improvement of society.

The association between death and anatomy continued in art anatomy, even as it waned in medical texts. Genga, a Roman anatomist, specialized in studies of classical sculptures. Errard, court painter to Louis XIV, helped found the Académie Royale de Peinture and was first Director of the Académie de France in Rome.

Kahn’s visualization of the digestive and respiratory system as "industrial palace"—really a chemical plant—was conceived in a period when the German chemical industry was the world’s most advanced.

This clumsy frontispiece features five notable anatomists posed around a cadaver. In the center of the picture, the image of the Earth, with the continent of "America" visible, signifies that the anatomized body is a "New World," and dissection a voyage of discovery.

The dissection of a body in an arcadian or classical setting, sometimes attended by muses or iconic medical figures such as Hippocrates, was a favorite subject for the anatomical frontispieces in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

The stiffness of the figures, and self-conscious theatricality of the scene, combined with the high "finish" of the lithograph, lend it a dreamy quality that anticipates 20th-century surrealism.

The anatomical studies for real, imaginary, and prospective sculptures and paintings proliferated in the early and middle decades of the 19th century.

A preoccupation with musculature was characteristic of much of art anatomy: here the striations of the muscles are emphasized to show their twisting, rope-like quality. The elevation of form over content, lends the illustration a feeling of high abstraction.

Anatomical studies, originally used in the composition of religious and historical paintings, became a genre in their own right.

A military doctor of the Napoleonic era, Salvage based his drawings on dissections of soldiers "killed in duels, in their prime." For this study of the Borghese Gladiator, an ancient Greek statue, he arranged his cadavers in the same pose as the sculpture and meticulously worked out the skeletal and muscular anatomy. Anatomical studies of important classical sculptures constituted a genre within fine art.

Gove argued that women needed to learn human anatomy as a crucial aid to moral and intellectual improvement, a controversial point in 1842. The praying skeleton—also used in William A. Alcott’s landmark popular anatomy, The House I Live In (1837)—is copied from William Cheselden’s 1713 Anatomy of the Humane Body.

A homeopathic practitioner, Pratt ardently recommended "orificial surgery"—operations on the mouth, nose, ears, rectum, cervix, urethra—for problems such as constipation, eczema, insanity, tuberculosis, or just for maintenance of health. His enthusiasm for surgery led to an emphasis on anatomy in writings for the public.

The nervous system here is visually compared to an electronic signaling system; the brain is an office where messages are sorted.

This manipulated photo shows the effects of sunlight on the health of the body.

The physiology of vision, with the rods and cones of the pupils as receptors of light, is compared to the technology of photographic reproduction in which an image is screened and broken down into dot patterns.

While the interior of the body is often visualized as a landscape or terrain, here the perspective is an anatomical landscape from the inside of the nostril looking out.

As agricultural laborers do the work of harvesting wheat, their bodies burn energy, a process symbolically represented by an internal flame.

The first x-ray image was the hand of Mrs. Wilhelm.

The announcement of Röntgen’s discovery, illustrated with an x-ray photograph of his wife’s hand, was hailed as one of mankind’s greatest technological accomplishments, an invention that would revolutionize every aspect of human existence.

The x-ray quickly became one of the defining devices of modern scientific medicine and was often featured in public health campaigns.

Sloan, a prominent exponent of the "Ashcan School," sought inspiration from everyday scenes and activities of modern life, such as the taking of x-rays, rather than landscape, nudes, and the other traditional subjects of academic art.

The process of anatomy involves a prying apart of the self. The dissecting mind is divorced from the dissected body. Our identification with anatomical images always creates a mirror effect: anatomical representations are always both Self and Other.

Katherine Du Tiel makes photographs of living bodies covered with projected anatomical images—a playful exploration of our continual attempts to synthesize the two, or perhaps an ironic comment on the impossibility of synthesis.

Finnish designer Jussi Ängeslevä’s interactive installation allows a visitor to track segments of the Visible Human data set against segments of his or her own body. Despite the discrepancy between displayed image and user—the lack of heartbeat and other internal movements, etc.—the immediacy of the interaction creates the illusion of reality. Visitors often assume they are seeing themselves. The experiential "realness" of Body Scanner shows how easily anatomical imagery gets translated into body image.

Suspended Self Portrait, an interactive sculpture installation, consists of 89 vinyl sheets painted with cross-section images derived from the Visible Human dataset. To determine the cross sections, artist Carolyn Henne made a mold of herself and sliced it. Then, she painted a corresponding Visible Human cross-section—organs, muscles, fat, bone—on each sheet. From a distance, the body seems to float in three dimensions. Closer up, visitors can touch the sheets to make the organs appear to assemble and dissolve. Blowing on the sheets or running one’s fingers along the edges causes the figure to subtly move as if floating or breathing. Suspended Self Portrait helps us to visualize an inner self often left unclaimed as we try to maintain our profile in the world.

In 17th-century Europe, readers were often encouraged to think of the anatomical body in geographical terms, as "a little world," or as a microcosm. "Whatsoever is in the universal world is also in man," and made visible through anatomy, argued Nicholas Culpepper in 1654. This animated laser hologram, by artist/scientist/journalist Alexander Tsiaras, updates the metaphor by refiguring the Visible Human as Atlas holding up the Earth. The piece is based on one of the most celebrated statues of antiquity, the Farnese Atlas (ca. 200 A.D., currently in the National Archeological Museum, Naples).

Originally created for the San Francisco Exploratorium’s Revealing Bodies exhibition, these two pieces representing the male and female Visible Human, are now the largest "books" in the National Library of Medicine’s collection. By virtue of their monumental scale, they allow viewers to enter into, and identify with, the Visible Humans, and remind us of their humanity. At the same time, the scale of the figures, and their "meatiness," may also provoke feelings of estrangement from our customary identification with anatomical imagery.