Representing Infirmity

Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy

John Henderson, Fredrika Jacobs, Jonathan K. Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000220315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

This volume is the first in-depth analysis of how infirm bodies were represented in Italy from c. 1400 to 1650. Through original contributions and methodologies, it addresses the fundamental yet undiscussed relationship between images and representations in medical, religious, and literary texts.

Looking beyond the modern category of 'disease' and viewing infirmity in Galenic humoral terms, each chapter explores which infirmities were depicted in visual culture, in what context, why, and when. By exploring the works of artists such as Caravaggio, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, this study considers the idealized body altered by diseases, including leprosy, plague, goitre, and cancer. In doing so, the relationship between medical treatment and the depiction of infirmities through miracle cures is also revealed. The broad chronological approach demonstrates how and why such representations change, both over time and across different forms of media. Collectively, the chapters explain how the development of knowledge of the workings and structure of the body was reflected in changed ideas and representations of the metaphorical, allegorical, and symbolic meanings of infirmity and disease.

The interdisciplinary approach makes this study the perfect resource for both students and specialists of the history of art, medicine and religion, and social and intellectual history across Renaissance Europe.

PART I
Approaches to the representation of infirmity

1
CANCER IN MICHELANGELO’S NIGHT. AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR RETROSPECTIVE DIAGNOSES

Jonathan K. Nelson

The uses and abuses of retrospective diagnoses

The lump on the left breast of the Night (Figure 1.1), a marble sculpture carved by Michelangelo in the 1520s, forces us to reconsider a series of widely held views, from the artist’s reputed ignorance of female anatomy to the modern fascination with medical diagnoses of art.¹ Before turning to the sculpture, the first section considers some methodological problems posed by retrospective diagnoses through art. As discussed in the second section, the breast of the Night shows the physical signs of advanced cancer, and it is portrayed in such a way to suggest that Michelangelo made a conscious decision to represent an infirmity. This all-too-human element alludes to death, an appropriate subject for the decoration of the Medici mausoleum in the Church of San Lorenzo, Florence, known since the sixteenth century as the New Sacristy. Moreover, early sources often refer to cancer as gnawing into flesh, and this metaphor complements perfectly Michelangelo’s overall conceit for the tomb: ‘time devours all things’. The third section presents the hypothesis that Michelangelo associated Night with the melancholic temperament, given that doctors then believed that the disease of melancholia could lead to cancer. The poses and body types of the four allegorical statues in the New Sacristy—Night and Day on the tomb of Duke Giuliano (Figure 1.2), and Dawn and Dusk on the tomb of Duke Lorenzo (Figure 1.3)—seem to reflect the four canonical temperaments.

FIGURE 1.1 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Night, detail

Source: Gianni Trambusti, with the concession of the Ministero per i beni culturali—Museo Nazionale del Bargello

FIGURE 1.2 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Tomb of Duke Giuliano de’ Medici, detail

Source: Gianni Trambusti, with the concession of the Ministero per i beni culturali—Museo Nazionale del Bargello

FIGURE 1.3 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Tomb of Duke Lorenzo de’ Medici, detail

Source: Gianni Trambusti, with the concession of the Ministero per i beni culturali—Museo Nazionale del Bargello

Over the last three decades, medical journals have regularly included articles by physicians attempting to discover various diseases represented in paintings and sculptures.² About twenty years ago, James Stark and I published one such study in the New England Journal of Medicine, ‘The Breasts of Night: Michelangelo as Oncologist’.³ Publications of this type attract little interest among historians of art or medicine. Specialists of paintings and sculptures generally ignore the research by physicians because of their unconvincing visual analyses of art. Another objection to this type of retroactive diagnose, especially for historians of medicine, is the lack of good data. Nevertheless, all can agree that modern physicians are trained and experienced in carrying out visual examinations. Surely some of the doctors who examine paintings and sculptures can make valuable observations for historical research. Many art historians, for example, now accept the proposal that Raphael represented the possessed boy in the Transfiguration (Vatican City) with the physical signs of epilepsy.⁴

Though an article from 2018 in The Lancet Oncology, titled, ‘Earliest evidence of malignant breast cancer in Renaissance paintings’, presents a valuable insight about the left breast depicted in Michele Tosini’s Night, as discussed in the following section, it also makes the erroneous claim that the painting shows ‘an irritated region surrounding the areola-nipple’.⁵ Photographs seem to support this observation, but direct observation reveals only a shadow, created in part with red pigment. The authors also identified a tumour in the left breast of the Allegory of Fortitude (Figure 1.4), painted in about 1560 by Maso da San Friano. Their discussion of the ‘large bulge’ reveals a more serious misreading of Renaissance art. The representation of a debilitating disease in an allegory of strength should have set off some warning signs. In reality, Maso first painted a smaller breast and then enlarged it; over time, the uppermost paint layer became more transparent, revealing the original version below. From afar, this might be confused with a lump, but up close, it looks as if the smaller breast is enclosed within a sphere of flesh-coloured glass⁶ (Figure 1.5). The methodological problem with the analyses of both paintings is obvious. The authors, all oncologists, did not know how to evaluate the visual evidence and did not consult a specialist in Renaissance art. One can only imagine how physicians would react if an art historian published conclusions about the unusual physical aspect of a patient, based on the examination of a single radio-graph, without speaking with a doctor or technician. The oncologists’ study of the Fortitude is said to be part of a larger project aimed at ‘training the eye of medical students’.⁷ This would transform the painting into a dangerous didactic tool, given that Maso did not depict a tumour.

FIGURE 1.4 Maso da San Friano, Allegory of Fortitude

Source: With the concession of the Ministero per i beni culturali—Galleria dell’Accademia

FIGURE 1.5 Maso da San Friano, Allegory of Fortitude, detail

Source: Rossella Lari, with the concession of the Ministero per i beni culturali—Galleria dell’Accademia

Painters and sculptors from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rarely depict serious illness or wounds in large-scale works, except for images of plague and leprosy victims. Far more typical is the highly stylized wound of Christ in Michelangelo’s Pietà (Vatican City). The artist and the educated viewers of his works were certainly familiar with Pliny the Elder, who addressed the topic of representing infirmity. In Natural History (34. 19. 59), he observed that a bronze sculpture by Pythagoras of Reggio depicting a lame man, presumably Philoctetes, ‘actually makes people looking at it feel a pain from his ulcer in their own leg’.⁸ Rather than follow this ancient example, Michelangelo and his contemporaries probably agreed with a view expressed by Plutarch, on the need for suitable imagery: ‘We avoid a man who is sickly or covered with sores as a disagreeable sight, but enjoy seeing Aristophon’s Philoctetes or Silanion’s Jocasta.’⁹ For Plutarch, the painting and sculpture, now both lost, evinced the beauty of representing what is fitting and suitable. A comparable sense of decorum led the sculptor Giammaria Mosca, working in the 1520s, to represent Philoctetes without physical imperfections (Figure 1.6), though the inscription of his marble relief reads: ‘This Poentian hero suffers from the Lernaean wound’.¹⁰ Infirmity, it seems, was better suited for words than images. Understandably, art historians remain sceptical about claims that Renaissance works include graphic representations of diseases.

FIGURE 1.6 Giammaria Mosca, Philoctetes

Source: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Historians of medicine are suspicious about diagnoses based on a single image, especially one that does not provide information deemed essential for identifying diseases. For example, medical texts from antiquity through the seventeenth century regularly use the term ‘cancer’ to describe a range of unnatural swellings. Over the last twenty years, studies by Luke Demaitre, Alanna Skuse, and Michael Stolberg have documented how the concept of cancer was constructed in pre-modern Europe.¹¹ The disease ‘was associated primarily with the breast and the uterus, with putrid, contagious secretions, and a pervasive impurity or contamination of the humours’.¹² Among other physical signs identified by Gabriele Falloppio, the sixteenth-century physician still noted for his study of the female reproductive system, are a ‘hard tumour’, a ‘rather ashen colour’, and ‘sharp and piercing’ heat.¹³ Naturally, a white marble statue cannot directly communicate the smell, feel, colour, or temperature of a tumour.

Medical historians have also addressed the incommensurability of Renaissance and modern models of disease.¹⁴ Notions about how the body (mis)functions have changed so radically over the centuries that we cannot simply overlay our modern understandings on the past. The main risk of presentism is not that one winds up with the wrong answer. Rather, the investigation itself reconfirms the widespread misconception that modern categories can be imposed on the past. For millennia, and throughout the early modern period, learned and popular authors agreed that infirmities could be traced to the corruption or impeded flow of one or more of the four essential humours circulating throughout the body: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.¹⁵ The predominance of one humour determined the temperament and complexion of an individual.¹⁶ All pre-modern authors agreed that cancer was caused by a congestion of black bile, a condition never mentioned by physicians today, so just what does it mean for a modern-day doctor to detect ‘cancer’ in a Renaissance work?

Scholars faced with the potential...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part I Approaches to the representation of infirmity
• Part II Institutions and visualizing illness
• Part III Disease and treatment
• Part IV Saints and miraculous healing
• Index
• Index of diseases