Renaissance Surgeons: Anatomy, Manual Skill and the Visual Arts

Abstract

By the second half of the sixteenth century, anatomy had become a conflicted resource for surgeons. Emphasized in a clinical context, anatomical experience was connected not only to less error, but to a practitioner’s violent approach to the living body of the patient. Taking the case study of two practitioners in late sixteenth-century Venice, this essay explores the problem of anatomy and the emergence of a more robust language of manual skill, with terms drawn from the visual arts.