Gothic Art in Spotlight: Human Anatomy since Renaissance

It has again been an awful long time since I have posted and the reason is that I am under a lot of stress at the moment. But now I would like to introduce to you a book I bought a long time a go at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

The name of the book is Human Anatomy. Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today by Benjamin A. Rifkin, Michael J. Ackerman and Judith Folkenberg. It was published 2006 by Thames&Hudson.

Basically this book is art history, and there are a huge amount of pictures of human bodies. I believe one of the reasons the book starts from the Renaissance is that before that it was not socially acceptable to go and study human bodies. Basically it could have been a social suicide to dig around in a dead member of the society. But when the natural sciences got a steadier position, people started to examine human body and the paintings and drawings of entrails became more life-like.

In this picture above you can see how carefully the face and expression if it's face are drawn, even though the actual point of the drawing is to teach anatomy and show the entrails.

In the picture below you can detect traces of Medieval morality and the Dance Macabre. In the upper left corner is a skeleton, called to Judgement. In the lower right there is a bunch of dead interrupting a evening of idle play.

I consider many of the pictures this Human Anatomy contains to be suitable for a goth. I would take every single one of those drawings above and hang them on my wall!

By the way, I am sorry for the poor quality of the pictures, it seems to be, that something in my camera has been broken. No matter how I alter the settings, it keeps thinking that there is not enough light and the pics are blurred. I must check if the warranty is still on.

Thanks for reading!