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Blame It on Eve: A History of the Woman in Art and Anatomy
— Gerald Stulc
It would be hard to find anyone with even a smattering of formal education who hasn’t heard of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, and kudos for recognizing Raphael and Titian, or Hieronymos Bosch. But who has heard of Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, or Fede Galizia? Yet, these women were respected and successful artists of the Renaissance, known by their contemporaries such as Michelangelo and Anton Van Dyck. Their artwork hangs in the Uffizi in Florence and other major art galleries, though only two of them are barely mentioned in current art history books, Anguissola and Gentileschi. I never learned of these women when studying art in college, as not a single woman artist from this or any other period was mentioned in noted art historian H.W. Janon’s textbook (1962). The demeaning of women, even misogyny, began well before and continued well after these Renaissance women. Such attitudes found expression not only in female representation in art, but more subtly in the context of the anatomical study of the female body.
There was a time deep in our history, the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) Period, when women were worshipped as givers of life, possessors of healing powers and prophesying, heralded in prehistoric art and anatomical depiction. Small clay and stone figurines, termed portable art with the sobriquet of “Venuses,” were created at least 25,000 years ago as possible fertility votive objects planted in the soil and alongside burials. The term “Venus” was applied by a 19th century male archeologist for their exaggerated breasts and buttocks. A common form of art was “vulvar art,” an engraved depiction of a vulva as another form of fertility object. Significant specimens of this artwork are thought to have been made by women, including handprints on cave walls conforming to differential finger lengths between men and women. Burials containing articles such as antlers, jewelry, and fox furs associated typically with shamans and healers have been found almost exclusively in the graves of women. Images of women as Mother Goddesses persisted into the 3rd centuries BCE.
The first true representations of women occurred in Sumeria and Egypt beginning around 3,000 BCE. Their presence in sculpture and tomb wall paintings suggest at least an equality between the two genders, substantiated by their recorded laws. The physicality of the women is no longer exaggerated but true to life, albeit idealized, with proportions based on a standardized grid system. Moreover, their hieroglyphs for anatomy were derived from rudimentary pictograms of a body part or organ. However, a formal knowledge of anatomy was never developed despite the practice of ritual mummification where major internal organs were removed. That knowledge would be left to the Greeks to develop.
In the Greco-Roman era, patriarchy superseded matriarchal and matrilineal societies common to many cultures until the Agricultural Revolution materialized in the 19th century BCE. Interestingly, while Greek mythology featured at least eleven types of female monsters—like the Medusa and Sirens, all of whom enticed, devoured, or otherwise destroyed men—there is only one truly male monster, the Minotaur, and a species of one-eyed giants, the Cyclopes, who were male and for the most part benevolent. Then there were the Satyrs, fun-loving goat-men who happened to chase and rape hapless young women.
Like the Egyptians, the Greeks found beauty in the idealized body and face of either gender. The Classical Period (500-404 BCE) saw an epiphany in art and anatomy within a short timeframe, with beautiful sculptures glorifying the male and female ideal form. The first female nude statute in history, Praxiteles’s Aphrodite (original no longer in existence), is so realistic that it became the Playboy centerfold of the ancient world, seducing one young man to attempt surreptitious copulation with her. By the Hellenistic Period, the Age of Alexander the Great, the eponymous city of Alexandria, Egypt became a center of scholasticism where the first recorded human dissections were conducted.
The Romans essentially appropriated Greek art and medical science, contributing very little of their own imprint; their art and medicine was largely dependent on Greek emigres or slaves. Most famous are the Fayum portraits of deceased Romans in Egypt, placed upon the wrappings of their mummified bodies. The frescoes in magnificent villas were also fortunately preserved, and frescoes are preserved from Pompeiian brothels depicting various sexual positions which the client can choose from.
With the advent of Semitic religions, Christianity in particular, we see the expansion of an existing patriarchal system in Greece and Rome, and its evolution into misogyny over the following centuries. Rather than First Mother, Eve became a scapegoat, blamed for the downfall of Adam and the human race, an attribution subsequently applied to women in general in the Middle Ages (c.600-c.1500 CE). The one significant exception was the Virgin Mary, essentially the only earthly woman apart from the occasional angel, customarily depicted as a representation of the “ideal woman” in early Medieval art.
A disturbing trend developed in the High and Late Middle Ages (c.1000-c.1500) where women were gratuitously depicted in art as sensual martyrs or women undergoing dissection, one that reached its height in the 18th and 19th centuries. A popular subject was the martyrdom of chaste St. Agatha, who had her breasts cut off for refusing the advances of a Roman nobleman. During this period, women progressively became the subject of allegorical paintings based on mythology, rather portrayals of society’s elites. Artistic renderings of the human body became more realistic, coinciding with an increasing number of academic and public dissections beginning in the 13th century. During this time female anatomy was largely restricted to crude, specious depictions of the gravid uterus, the fetus pictured as a miniature adult. This was also an era that saw the emergence of women physicians and books on gynecology and midwifery.
The Renaissance (c.1400-c.1600) sought to resurrect and improve upon the newly appreciated knowledge of antiquity. During this period, profound changes occurred in art, technology and the sciences, and society including Humanism, the Age of Discovery, the First Scientific Revolution and the first accurate atlas of human anatomy.
The Renaissance women artists referenced at the beginning of the article were, as noted, respected and famous for their paintings, particularly Artemesia Gentileschi (1593-1656). Her father, a noted painter, offered eleven-year-old Artemesia the chance to assist an artist painting frescoes for a local church. One morning, while the father was away, the painter came to Artemesia’s home and raped her. Despite a trial, he was not convicted of a crime, a conclusion that embittered the young girl for the remainder of her life. Artemesia certainly sought catharsis during her lifetime by painting five versions of The Beheading of Holofernes, by legend an Assyrian general who besieged a town governed by the beautiful Judith.
Refusing to surrender, she instead sneaked into his camp one night with her servant, seduced a drunken Holofernes, and promptly beheaded him. Only through the efforts in 2005 of Jane Fortune, an art journalist residing in Florence, were the works of 36 Florentine women artists brought out from dusty storage and exhibited with the acclaim denied them over four centuries (Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence. Jane Fortune, 2009).
In 1538, during the Late Renaissance, the Venetian painter Titian (c.1488-1576) created the first secular painting of a nude female unrelated to Eve or a mythological goddess. It unambiguously depicts a young woman relaxing in her boudoir, looking directly at you (Fig 8). The painting was controversial when first displayed, but set a precedent for depicting the female nude not seen since the Greco-Roman period. Titian named the painting, “The Venus of Urbino.”
Five years later, Flemish anatomist and surgeon Andreas Vesalius published his groundbreaking anatomical atlas, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body). Its publication heralded the first accurate depiction of human anatomy, based on over 600 hundred human dissections. Two hundred magnificent woodcuts were created by a student of Titian, including images of female anatomy.
Several decades earlier, the archetypal Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci, dissected cadavers, and brilliantly inked his findings in his famous anatomical drawings, with highly accurate depictions of the human gravid uterus and fetus, placenta, and copulation. Unfortunately, his seminal drawings were shown only in his circle of fellow artists and students, and not made public until three hundred years later.
Despite all the apparent humanism, flourishing arts and scientific insights during the Renaissance and Age of Discovery, the status of women remained bleak. First the early, male anatomists assigned Latin names or personal eponyms to anatomical structures they discovered. At the same time, a great interest in “the secrets of women,” as it was called then, took hold, as research through human dissection became established in major universities in Europe and the Americas.
Secondly, the Renaissance saw disruptive societal and religious changes that transformed Medieval society. Heresies that threatened the status quo of the Church were brutally suppressed through papal bulls, inflammatory broadsides and books blaming such threats on witchcraft. The period from roughly 1580 to 650 saw the height of the witch hysteria that had commenced around 1400, involving arrests and executions of tens of thousands of people, up to 85% of whom were women. Women, like Jews, were a marginalized group readily vulnerable as scapegoats for plagues, crop failures and heretical religious movements. Soon witch hunts became endemic, especially in Germany, France, and Switzerland. Moreover, women were often labeled a succubus, the weaker but more devious gender who conspired with supernatural forces of evil, inflicting woes upon mankind.
As the more subtle, graceful style of Rococo blended into the Neoclassicism with its assemblage of seminude gods and goddesses cavorting in the cloud-strewn heavens, anatomical imaging of the female body followed suit. Now the ideal body form was depicted with Rococo strains of sensuality, even eroticism, combined with the clear-eyed objectivity of the enlightened scientific mind.
Nothing serves as a better example of this than the hyper-realistic wax models created by Italian artist Clemente Susini (1754-1814) for the natural history museum in Florence and for medical teaching. Before Susini, robust anatomical dissection and research had essentially defined every detail of gross anatomy (visible to the naked eye). Susini meticulously recreated this anatomy, including the branching of blood vessels, nerves, and lymphatics in high detail and coloration. While he fashioned both male and female versions, his “Venuses,” are decisively more sensual, bearing poses and expressions of ecstasy. Faces embellished with lipstick and mascara, the use of real human head and body hair and jewelry complete the effect.
With burgeoning scientific knowledge and technological advances in printing, anatomical atlases boasted marvelous amalgams of art and science, The apogee was a brilliant set of colored and hand-tinted lithographs by Nicolas Henri Jacob (1782–1871) for the Bourgery atlas of human anatomy. By the mid-19th century the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and Jacob’s beautiful lithographs were soon superseded by the dry black-and-white diagrams of Gray’s Anatomy (1853), a “loss of soul” as science historian Mark Kemp wrote. That didn’t pertain to the Romantic art of the period, with women still sexualized, as in Goya’s “The Naked Maja,” and Édouard Manet’s groundbreaking “The Luncheon on the Grass” (1862–63) showing a nude woman sitting between two clothed men. A cringe-worthy “The Autopsy” by Enrique Signore (1896) shows an elderly physician gazing upon the lithe, unclothed body of a young woman.
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was an American Impressionist painter of great renown, who spent much of her life in France painting the special bond between a woman and child. One of her masterpieces is “The Bath,” showing a young woman in striped dress bathing her child. Cassatt reestablished what it truly meant to be a woman, but she remained a rarity in a male-dominated field.
At the dawn of the 20th century the First World War (1914-1918) extinguished monarchies, shifted borders, created new countries, introduced ambivalent leaps in technology, and cost an estimated 15-22 million lives. To survivors, the romanticism that preceded the Great War mutated into disillusionment, cynicism, and hedonism. German artists, veterans of the war, sexualized and fetishized women, often depicting them as prostitutes and gold-diggers to dissolute financiers and grotesquely scarred war veterans. With old standards shattered, the very abstractions that form life became the fertile soil for new generations of artists, who continued the subtle misogyny and dissection of women in Cubism and Abstract art. Notable are the works of Picasso disassembling women in his paintings, and Willem de Kooning, who in his Women Series portrayed women as menacing ogres with jigsaw puzzle bodies.
In contrast, women artists were once again coming into their own in the last century, after Mary Cassatt, notably Georgia O’Keefe and Frida Kahlo. O’Keefe painted only one female nude in her lifetime; Kahlo focused on woman as a reflection of her own inner and outer traumas, as in “The Broken Column.” The painting alludes to severe spinal injuries suffered in 1925 in a Mexico City streetcar accident, but the striking symbolism refers to far greater inner pain and debility than her surgically repaired spine. Kahlo is one of the important women artists of the 20th century, yet wasn’t mentioned in Janson’s art history and several other texts.
Misogony was an arguably blatant element of advertising in the middle of the last century, where the role of the woman as sexual object and thethered homemaker became the theme for selling products. Messaging was directed at men, and clearly formulated to send a barely subliminal message to women to “know their place” in society. At the same time marketing and advertising influenced anatomical illustration. Dr. Frank Netter (1905-1991) started out as an advertising illustrator, but later attended medical school at his family’s urging. Despite completing a residency in surgery, the Depression Years offered little compensation for his profession, and Netter returned to illustration. Ciba Pharmaceuticals offered him a lucrative contract to illustrate human anatomy and pathology for their medical series. His eventual output of over 4,000 illustrations of complex human anatomy and disease states were integral to medical students in supplementing arcane and complex textbooks and lectures, including the female endocrine system.
In the 1960s the advent of the birth control pill and the burgeoning womens movement gave rise to artists like Judy Chicago and Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Jenna Gribbon as well as women performance and body artists who challenged the status quo. In 1974-79 Judith Cohen, aka Judy Chicago (1939-present) created “The Dinner Party,” a lifesize dinner table with 39 settings, all prepared in anticipation of the acceptance of women in a male-dominated art world (Fig. 23). Barbara Kruger created photos and silkscreens promoting feminist goals such as the “Your body is a battleground,” for the 1989 Pro-choice March. Subsequent artists like England’s Jenny Saville have concentrated on self-portraits and female nudes that defy the traditional imperative of imaging the “ideal” woman in representational art.
Currently, new anatomical imaging technologies permit novel avenues for demonstrating the intricacies of the human body, including CAT and MRI scans that can painlessly dissect the most minute anatomies, as well as the plastination process that preserves dissected human bodies for long periods of study.
We now come full circle, to the most profound relationship between the art and the anatomy of the female body—the appreciation, respect, and dignity of a woman’s greatest power, that of procreation of the human race, bearing and nursing our progeny. We have much to learn from our ancestors who resided in our deepest history, who understood and worshipped that power rather than abused and objectified it, or felt threatened by it. Time will tell.
Dr Gerald Stulc has studied military and medical history all of his professional life as a cancer surgeon. In that capacity, he wrote a number of scientific articles and participated in cancer research. He served close to sixteen years as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy Reserves, Medical Corps, and studied at the Naval War College in Newport, RI. He retired from the Navy as a Captain (06). Following his retirement from surgery, he obtained an MFA in Creative writing. His love of the history of military medicine led him to write The Surgion’s Mate, taking the title from a medical book written by naval surgeon John Woodall in 1617.
Dr. Stulc blended his direct experiences in surgery and the military with his studies of history in recreating the era of war and medicine, the society and its values, love, faith and coming of age during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe (1799-1815). This article recaps some of the material Dr. Stulc presented in an OLLI online class this summer. This winter Dr. Stulc will teach an online class for OLLI-USF entitled A History of China | Thurs 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM • 10/9-11/20 • 7 mtgs. Keep checking our catalog and webpage to register.
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