Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

You're quite right, but there is something strangely amusing to me about the idea of art inspired by religion in a thread about the Sistine chapel. It's almost more like science trumping religion. There are quite a few theories on just what some images are of - sections of brain, cross section of a penis, brain stem, eye, shoulder etc.

View on HN

In this case I should have probably used 'funded', but in those days not having a religion was not really an option.

Michelangelo was at continuous odds with his employers during his lifetime, he dissected corpses illegally at first, later with tacit approval of some of the church bigwigs in order to improve his skills as an artist. It was a continuous give-and-take to see who got the most out of the arrangement.

In the end I think we, the future dwellers able to see his work no matter what caused them to come into being are the real winners.

Not bad for a man who declared himself unfit to execute the work because he was a sculptor, not a painter...

There is a very good book about him that I forgot the title of (I read it ages ago).

> "declared himself unfit as a painter" ?

Wasn't it more like "declared painting as unfit for him"? Michelangelo had a strong disdain for paintings and painters especially Leonardo Da Vinci and his friends.

My only source is [this biography](1). Not sure how accurate that is.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Agony-Ecstasy-Biographical-Michela...

I did not write that he declared himself unfit as a painter, I wrote that he did not consider himself to be a painter. Michelangelo's first love was marble, not paint.

You may be referring to Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King. Fantastic read for the interested. http://www.amazon.com/Michelangelo-Popes-Ceiling-Ross-King/d...

The Agony and the Ecstasy, by Irving Stone, perhaps? Its the first thing that came to mind when I saw this. Irving Stone's Lust for Life, about Vincent Van Gogh, is pretty good as well.

Given the timing that is most likely the one but I wouldn't know for sure without reading a few pages. Thanks for the hint. I've long ago lost pretty much all my books so it's hard for me to be sure about what I read where and when. Much appreciated.

Most likely those interpretations of Michelangelo's frescoes as brain stem, etc are a case of pareidolia. In the case of the "brain cross-section" (where God touches Adam) There is no reason why Michelangelo should choose what is now a standard representation of the brain in a sagittal cross-section over any other cross-section; in fact the image doesn't look very much like a real brain in cross-section, but is closer to the stylized one that appears in modern text-books (which Michelangelo would obviously not have been aware of).

A midline section is the obvious one. And there are images by him in the chapel that have similarity to coronals too. Of all the images that look like anatomy the most famous one of the brain is the least obvious one in my opinion. Although that said, it isn't too much of a stretch to see it. I wouldn't really call it that stylised so much as obscured, presumably to prevent the bill payer moaning. Out of curiosity, when do you call text book image stylised? MR and CT images are basically the same as textbooks but without the colour. Many texts actually use the MR image as their image as they are so very good (sinus area possibly excluded).

MR images, etc, are very modern. The choice of image to be displayed in a text book is not based only on what one would see if one had a brain to dissect at hand; dissection procedures, and the sections that result, are determined by precedence.

The "standard" sagittal section as in this image (i.imgur.com/ZTvy55n.jpg), or this image (i.imgur.com/73YdDXa.jpg) is chosen precisely because it shows in one image several important features of the brain, and is also recapitulated nicely by MRI images, as you mention.

However, there is no reason why Michelangelo would know anything about the different regions of the brain and therefore choose a representation that showed them.

A "fresh" human brain (which is what Michelangelo would have seen) looks like this (i.imgur.com/KXBLtrx.jpg), or this (i.imgur.com/Bm5l8n6.jpg), and without further dissection do not look much like his paintings.

Such brains can be further sectioned in any number of ways, none of which are necessarily obvious. The question then is would Michelangelo have dissected brains in the same way as is now done?

That's a good question. I think that his interest in dissection was not driven by any desire to know anatomy per-se, but mostly by a desire to be a better sculptor. From his perspective (or at least, from what I know of his perspective, which is very much limited by what we know about him) what was in the head was not all that interesting. But muscles, the skeleton, the locations of internal organs that gave shape to the abdomen and such were of great interest. He could use that knowledge to depict people in a more realistic way.

The inside of the skull is not shaping the skull in a way that it will come out 'wrong' if you don't know about what's in the skull.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com