The shocking history of anatomical painting

5386 views 0 comment(s)

Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson is one of the most famous paintings dealing with anatomy, and it shows a group of people examining the body of an executed criminal, Photo: Mauritshuis, The Hague

Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

08.02.2026. 08:21h

Debora Nichols-Lee

BBC culture

His body is like sculpted gray marble, every muscle flawlessly shaded.

But the illuminated figure in Rembrandt's painting The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicholas Talp (1632) is not a hero of Greek antiquity.

He is an executed criminal being dissected in the operating room.

His crime?

He stole a winter coat.

Warning: This article contains scenes and details that may be disturbing to some readers.

Over a period of five centuries, the deceased in anatomy textbooks are currently on display in Under the covers: Anatomy, painting and power, at the Thackeray Museum of Medicine in the British city of Leeds, were also meticulously recreated.

These mostly anonymous figures, often with their entire entrails exposed, illustrated medical atlases that were once used by doctors and anatomists or displayed as trophies by wealthy collectors.

And like Adrian Adrianson, the petty thief painted by Rembrandt, none of them agreed to have the images of their naked, mutilated bodies printed in a book or hung on a wall.

"The exhibition Under the Shroud makes visitors wonder whose bodies are in anatomy textbooks, who drew them and why," Jamie Taylor, the museum's director of collections, learning and programmes, tells the BBC.

"The bodies depicted on these pages belong to people who have been oppressed throughout history, whose rights have been considered secondary, neglected, or ignored."

An anatomy book without drawings is "no better than a geography book without maps", he said 18th-century surgeon and anatomical illustrator John Bell.

His intricately cross-hatched engravings spread a detailed knowledge of the body that few have seen outside the operating room.

But a closer study of these illustrations will reveal not only our changing understanding of the human body, but also the cultural context in which these images were created.

Particularly indicative, and shown very early in the exhibition, is the detailed title page of Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), the first major text to depict human anatomy drawn directly from dissected bodies.

In a packed auditorium for anatomy class, the author, a perpetual entertainer, performs a dissection on an executed sex worker - his scalpel revealing to the mostly male audience whether the woman was pregnant, as she had stated in her plea for clemency.

The difference in social status and power between surgeon and subject could hardly be more obvious, and the market for such elaborately illustrated books was, the exhibition points out, “at the opposite end of the economic spectrum of the people depicted in their pages.”

Medical books became especially lavish when developments in lithography in the 19th century flooded their pages with vivid colors.

The museum's edition of J. M. Burghery's lavishly illustrated Complete Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery (1866) has barely been touched, museum curator Dr. Jen Genn tells the BBC.

Those who could afford such works, he says, “would display them in their own homes along with their art collections.”

Sometimes the corpse itself would become an art object for display.

The lack of control that many women had over what happened to their bodies after death, and the sinister role that some respected health professionals played in it, is best illustrated by the case of Mary Billion.

She died in 1775 and was embalmed by her dentist husband, Martin van Buchel, with the help of the esteemed London surgeon William Hunter, his former teacher and author of an illustrated book about pregnant bodies, praised for its unprecedented realism.

Hoping to attract new clients, Van Buchel dressed Billion in her wedding dress and displayed her in the window of his dental practice and home in Mayfair until his second wife insisted on having the body transferred to a museum.

Painting and anatomy have long been related.

In Renaissance Italy, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo made studies of dissected bodies in mortuaries to make the figures in their paintings more realistic, while early anatomical atlases presented bodies in stylized poses reminiscent of classical sculptures.

William Cheselden's Anatomy of the Human Body (1741), for example, contains an image of two skinless figures wrestling, like Hercules and Antaeus.

For scientists and painters alike, the greatest challenge was access to the bodies, made more difficult by the Death Penalty Act of 1823, which reduced the number of crimes punishable by death.

A lucrative new black market in corpses emerged, with body thieves, nicknamed "resurrectionists," stealing corpses from fresh graves and selling them to medical schools for hefty sums.

To thwart them, those who could afford it buried their loved ones in cages known as "dead vaults," or paid to have heavy stones placed over the gravesite.

For convicted criminals and the poor, the place of eternal rest was less certain.

The relatives of highwayman John Worthington, executed in 1815, took the extra step of dousing his body with acid to ensure it was unsuitable for vivisection.

Notorious serial killers

William Hare and William Burke became Scotland's most notorious serial killers.

They used the living rather than the dead, conducting a 10-month murderous campaign between 1827 and 1828 to supply Dr. Robert Knox's Edinburgh School of Anatomy with corpses.

Mary Patterson, a former resident of an asylum for “fallen” women, whose dead body was suspiciously warm upon arrival, was intoxicated with whiskey by her attackers before being preserved in it for three months at Knox.

The law eventually caught up with her killers.

Although Herr was acquitted for lack of evidence, his accomplice was not so lucky.

Judge David Boyle sentenced him to death by hanging and ordered that Burke, like his victims, be "publicly vivisected and anatomized."

His skeleton it now hangs in the University of Edinburgh's Museum of Anatomy.

The Thackeray Museum of Medicine also exhibited Mary Paterson's body, but as a drawing - an ethical issue hotly debated by the curatorial team.

She is painted like Velazquez Venus Rokbi, points out Gen.

"It's a very sensual image," he says, but it's also, "the dead body of a murder victim that continues to be exploited."

These medical books are dominated by idealized physiognomies, blurring the line between science, painting, and eroticism, and offering insights into the preferences and preoccupations of their creators.

In one of the most tactile illustrations for Bourgeoisie by Nicolas Henri Jacob, scientific bias is called into question as two pairs of disembodied male hands examine the vivisectioned breast of a young woman whose hair is depicted as belonging to an ancient Greek beauty.

"Anatomical illustrations radiated heat, providing pleasure to the men who made, viewed, and studied them," claims Michael Sapol in the book Queer anatomy (2024)

For surgeon and painter Joseph Maclis, that “gaze” was queer, according to Sapol.

MacLean's seminal work, Surgical Anatomy (1851), is dominated by men in ambiguous poses: their muscular arms raised submissively. behind their heads, for example, or su im mouth open in a way that could be interpreted as pleasure.

It is possible, Sapol theorizes in essay from 2021, "that Maclis's drawings, in some queer and covert way - perhaps not even entirely obvious to Maclis himself - were spaces in which he revealed himself, sending out signals of homoerotic lust."

“People think that an anatomical illustration is an objective description of the human body to the best of the artist’s ability,” says Gen, a belief that this exhibition aims to “dispel.”

"In reality, they depend on culture, taste, and artistic movements just like any other form of painting and illustration."

The unnamed black figure in McLeish's book, believed to be the only black body in anatomical works of the period, is perfect evidence for this thesis, as it was removed from the edition produced for America before abolition.

His account, as Karen Rosa Hammerschlag points out in a 2021 essay, Black Apollo: Aesthetics, Vivisection, and Race in Joseph MacLeish's Surgical Anatomy, "is noticeably aestheticized, placing it in dialogue with classical statues such as the Apollo Belvedere, the "high" artwork of Joseph's brother Daniel MacLeish, paintings of black boxers, and abolitionist scenes from the period".

Within a decade of MacLeish, Henry Gray's celebrated Gray's Anatomy, illustrated by Henry Vandyke Carter, would finally bring a receptive resource into the hands of medical students, but it still owed too much to the anonymous bodies of workhouses and dispensaries.

"There is a silence at the heart of Gray's Anatomy, as in all other anatomical books, which refers to the unspeakable," writes Ruth Richardson in The emergence of Gray's Anatomy.

"Like mass-produced images, the bodies of these people entered the minds of entire generations of living people... And they received no other mention than in Carter's paintings."

The use of voiceless victims to advance medical science persisted into the 20th century.

Eduard Pernkopf's Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy (1937), for example, still used by some surgeons today, with prisoners of war being opened by Nazi doctors working under Hitler's regime.

Sixty years later, on the threshold of the new millennium, a digital archive of the entire human body, created by The Visible Man Project, was published in Thomas McCracken's New Atlas of Human Anatomy.

The 3D images were created from hundreds of millimeters of body slices of Joseph Paul Jarnigan, a Texas murderer executed by lethal injection in 1993.

Although he agreed to donate his body to medical science, he could not have imagined such a bright future for him.

“That vast data set is still available for human use today,” says Gen, who concludes the exhibition with the question: “How far have we actually come?”

Under the covers: Anatomy, painting and power It was on display at the Thackeray Museum of Medicine, in Leeds, UK, from February 7 to June 21.

BBC is in Serbian from now on and on YouTube, follow us HERE.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram i Viber. If you have a topic suggestion for us, please contact bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk

Bonus video: