A Trip Through Classical Anatomical History

Ancient art can show us a thing or two about the human need to embrace the anatomy that forms us. The Venus Of Willendorf  (pictured left), tells a story of a potter in 24,000BC. Forming this sumptuous, rolling, beautiful statue out of clay with their hands, the potter shows a vast appreciation of the female form, unveiling our eyes to the openness that the body can be admired. With her hands resting on her breasts, in an easy stance, this statue will hopefully be the first step along the way to understanding that the body, the shell that cases our life force, should be softly and easily looked upon. When we look at anatomy, we are looking at ourselves, and so the subject shouldn't be classified simply into the medical field of understanding, or with mental constraint.

We all have a basic right to understand how we function.

If we are going back to 24,000BC to start our search for why anatomy is not just integral to massage therapy, but also for our own understanding of ourselves, I hope you will forgive this less than in-depth blog! But I do believe that art can be a good way of looking at how we understand anatomy in it's Classical Westernized History.

The Greeks followed the Egyptians in the development of medicine. Not only did Hypocrates give us the oath on which Medical Practitioners still swear on today, but Galen performed brain and eye surgery. The Greek's observations of how the body functioned influenced medical thought right up into the middle ages in Europe. But it is the art that we still have around us today that we can gaze on to enhance our understanding of bodies and movement.

Take a look at the Greek and Roman sculptures in any museum and you will see bodies ripple with movement. As they are seen in battle, the worriers are depicted with  tension and anger, whilst the nymphs are refined and gaze into the middle distance. These different poses are great to look at as they tell of muscles, fascia, bones, organs, blood and lymph flowing in harmony to create the human existence. Experience is captured in stone, but the existence of the models who posed for the art is almost palpable. I have never stood looking at these amazing forms and thought about the singular systems that make movement happen; the 10 that are taught to every Massage student in the U.K. All I have ever seen are amazing bodies in flight!

Then we get to the galleries that house the Pre-Renaissance drawing. I love these as they are paintings of exquisite skill, but the hands are often 'wrong'!  If you see sketch books from the famous Painters, they will often be filled with sketches of hands as they are so complicated in the way that they move to express emotion. The truth is that artists didn't know much about what was under the skin, and so they had very little idea about how to draw the mechanics of the hand.

Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man 

It was only until we hit the Renaissance that we see art catching up, (and the hands improving!) with anatomy as we know it today. Dissection work was limited to the Medics, and it took a lot for Leonardo DaVinci to get a place within the dissection rooms so that he could make a comprehensive study of the human form. His ideas of anatomy lay in the Greek/Roman ideas that all mammals were the same, just in different proportions. So, when Da Vinci found that he had the Tibia and Fibula (lower leg) of a man but no foot, he got a foot of a bear and drew it underneath the human leg. After 25 years he realized that human anatomy is unique, but due to the lack of human forms that he could draw from he drew a fully formed baby and then surrounded it with the uterus of a cow!

However, Da Vinic demonstrated that the Biceps not only flex the arm, but also supernate the arm, allowing your hand turn down toward the floor. This wasn't recognized for nearly 300 years after his work was put away into private collections.

Leonardo Da Vinci's work is also recognized for looking at the separate systems that we are so fond of today. The skeletal, vascular and muscular systems are all well documented. And I wonder if this is why we still see them in such singular entities today? Was it that his work was so ground breaking, and the work of the medics around him were so ahead of their field that the beauty of anatomy that they did find wasn't questioned until relatively recently?

Connective tissue, the Fascia that is so fashionable today, was the goop that was forgotten about, ignored and thrown away. Only now are we fully realizing that superficial fat is incased in connective tissue that is so important.

Western anatomy, in its classical form is sectioned into systems that we can understand. This is a fantastic building block to see how we move. It's also brilliant for physicians to grapple with as they can become expert in one part of the body. But as Body Workers it's vital to see the body as a whole, a sum of all the parts. I also think that the Medical World would benefit from looking at the body in a more holistic way - embracing how their expertise on one aspect has knock on effects to the rest of the body.

When you see the body depicted in art, start to ask yourself what the body is showing you. Can you see

Michelangelo's David
See where his body is shifted,
tilted and rotated!

where there maybe tension? A shortening in the musculature, a contraction within the stance. Are there parts that are overly long, causing weakness? Now see if there is a connection between them - can you spot that one side is long and weak and the other short and tight? Try and get your eye into seeing how this may change the posture in the statue or painting that you are looking at.

There are many ways to look at anatomy through time. If you are interested, I would recommend getting a bottle of wine and relaxing with and internet rampage for an evening or two! Start looking at a part you are interested in; historically or anatomically based, and go from there. One aspect you could look into is the Arabic texts; ancient manuscripts with intricate drawings of the eyes. Or check out the Greeks and the humors to find out how phlegm and bile were supposed to effect the body.

For me the unanswerable question is at what time, and why, did we start systemizing the body to such a degree that we stopped looking at it as a whole?

If you have the answer, do let me know! I look forward to chatting it over with you via Twitter, or through the Cornerstone Therapies' website.

Until next time, enjoy your own journey into Classical Anatomy  and enjoy the museums!