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The liver, the heart, and the brain : Francesco Scannelli and the body of painting
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Pericolo, Lorenzo (2019) The liver, the heart, and the brain : Francesco Scannelli and the body of painting. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 71-72 . pp. 178-191. doi:10.1086/706279 ISSN 0277-1322.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1086/706279
Abstract
In the introduction to Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes notes that man succeeds so well in imitating nature that, unknowingly, he is able to “make an artificial animal.” “Why may we not say,” he wonders, “that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?” Indeed, man’s heart is “but a spring,” the nerves “so many strings,” and the joints “so many wheels giving motion to the whole body.” The body politic, Hobbes insists, is also a human creation, a creature: “an artificial man.” In keeping with this set of similes, Hobbes defines sovereignty as an “artificial soul . . . giving life and motion to the whole body” and the members of the executive order as “artificial joints” linked to “reward and punishment” as if to “artificial nerves.” As construed by Hobbes, the body politic is not immune to pathological dysfunction; in the commonwealth, concord is health, sedition is sickness, and civil war death. Francesco Scannelli (1616–1663) is unlikely to have been acquainted with Hobbes’s work. By endowing painting with a metaphorical body in his Microcosmo della pittura (1657), he was certainly not inspired by the cogent analogy at the core of Leviathan. However, Scannelli was assuredly fascinated with the notion of the body as a portentous machine, a fascination he shared with innumerable contemporaneous physicians and natural philosophers across Europe, among them René Descartes. In his treatises on man and the human body (which were unknown to Scannelli), Descartes goes so far as to interpret the entire operation of the human body as a nearly artificial mechanism, its organs operating similarly to “the motions of a watch, or some other automaton” triggered by “springs and wheels.” To be sure, Scannelli would never have espoused such an extreme conception of man’s microcosm, that is, of the human body. The mechanics of Scannelli’s body machine, in fact, still rely upon spiritual faculties pulling all the basic strings of man’s physiologic activity. By the standards of his own time, Scannelli’s ideas about the human body can hardly be considered cutting edge. Although he endorses the role of experience in medical theory by stressing the substantial importance of anatomic dissections and their findings, he chiefly refers to the works of earlier physicians and anatomists, showing no apparent interest in contemporary debates about medicine and, more broadly, the experimental sciences. Neither a pioneer nor an innovator, Scannelli does not belong in the league of Hobbes and Descartes. And yet, his redefinition of painting as an organic body is unprecedented and not entirely devoid of original insights. The primary hurdle to comprehending the essence of Scannelli’s enterprise, and in probing its consistency, is the long-winded, at times unfocused, overly abstract, and oddly-structured nature of his argumentations, which generate confusion and even disorientation. Additionally problematic are the typographical errors scattered throughout the 1657 edition of the Microcosmo. In spite of these obstacles, however, it can be argued that Scannelli’s physiological views on painting obey a relatively coherent design. The intention of this essay is to navigate Scannelli’s text along a sub-textual itinerary, following the leads offered by his marginal notes and reassembling the armature of his thought process in a different, more self-explanatory sequence.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||||
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Alternative Title: | Die Leber, das Herz und das Gehirn: Francesco Scannelli und der Körper der Malerei | ||||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History of Art | ||||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics | ||||||||||
Publisher: | University of Chicago Press | ||||||||||
ISSN: | 0277-1322 | ||||||||||
Official Date: | 15 November 2019 | ||||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 71-72 | ||||||||||
Number of Pages: | 277 | ||||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 178-191 | ||||||||||
DOI: | 10.1086/706279 | ||||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 18 June 2018 | ||||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 15 November 2020 | ||||||||||
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