The History of Anatomical Drawing: How Illustrations Revolutionized Science

Discover the link between science and art found in anatomical drawing

We have 100,000 kilometers of blood vessels, 206 bones, and 600 muscles. And although it may seem impossible, art has depicted every single one of them in strokes as precise as a scalpel.

For centuries, artists have captured images that are more faithful to human life, thanks to anatomical drawing.

But their charcoal sketches not only revolutionized painting, they also transformed medicine. Discover the history of anatomical drawing in this video, and how the union between art and science has allowed us to come up with better explanations of ourselves.

1. The origins

Throughout history, we have portrayed human figures on countless media and to varying degrees of success. From the caves to the pyramids, via mosaics, frescoes and medieval manuscripts. Although many of the first original drawings of human anatomy have been lost, several examples have been conserved in medieval anatomical treaties.

Mansur’s Anatomy is an atlas of the body containing some of the oldest Islamic anatomical drawings to have survived.

The Fasciculus Medicinae is another Medieval document in which you can admire diagrams of the body including the Wound Man. This image was copied into numerous treatises at that time. It shows all the potential wounds and diseases that the average man at that time could suffer.

2. The Renaissance and anatomical drawing

In Medieval times a drawing could be admired as beautiful even if it wasn’t a realistic representation of the human form. But with the dawn of the Renaissance, anatomical drawing became essential for artists wanting to refine their style. As artists returned human beings to the central spotlight, many artists also became anatomists.

Anatomical drawings also helped doctors, as what they learned through observation began to be disseminated in the form of illustrations.

If one artist and anatomist towered over everyone else, it was Leonardo Da Vinci. In 1510 he worked hand in hand with dissection master Marcantonio della Torre, who allowed him into the autopsy room. He illustrated almost every bone in the human body as well as the major muscle groups, over two years. Leonardo recorded his observations in what is now known as the Anatomical Manuscript A, an incredible treatise that reveals what a fetus looks like inside the mother’s womb.

Andreas Vesalius is another key name. He wrote De humani corporis fabrica (Of the Structure of the Human Body) an anatomical manual containing his own and Jan Stephan van Calcar’s illustrations. Unlike other anatomical illustrations, the figures don’t look like lifeless pieces of flesh, they show the figure in motion and were posed to resemble classical statues in bucolic landscapes.

In the following years, interest in our body and collaborations between artists and anatomists enabled the creation of beautiful anatomical drawings.

Others were very original, like the flap anatomical drawings, illustrations with a system of flaps that gradually revealed the layers of the body to show inside the organs. Some designs were incredibly macabre, such as bodies left holding their own skin.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, anatomical studies could be found all around the globe thanks to greater medical knowledge. Examples were now available everywhere, including The Blue Beryl, a treatise of Tibetan medicine containing 79 tangkas (or paintings) that tell us about traditional medical practice.

3. Creative anatomical drawing

This art form wasn’t pure science, anatomical drawing was still a field in which artists exercised their creativity and used artistic license, for example the Anatomy of Bones, by William Cheselden, in which skeletons posed for the reader.

Backgrounds featured landscapes and even included famous contemporary animals like Clara, a rhinoceros exhibited as a fairground attraction across Europe, who appears in this anatomical drawing by Jan Wandelaar.

Illustrations also reveal how accepted aesthetics varied between countries. This Japanese anatomical drawing from the Edo period is very different from the bodies being drawn in the West at the same time.

The popularization of color in the following centuries allowed anatomical illustrations to gain greater depth. And the art of anatomical drawing progressed steadily into the present, where children, doctors, artists and the curious still use them as a way to acquire and share knowledge, and to enjoy art.

Love this video? If you want to learn the fundamentals to be able to draw the human body in its ideal proportions without a life model, don’t miss Zursoif’s online course: Figure Drawing for Beginners.

English version by @studiogaunt.

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