A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
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For more information
about this contest,
click here.
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Contest Winner No. 41.
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Michelangelo/Vesalius.
Submitted by R.A. Villanueva
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"THESE BODIES LACKING PARTS"
With raw sienna crushed by fist
in mortar, umber ground
to tender shadow to flesh,
Michelangelo binds a body,
mid-thrash, to the plaster,
its death flex throwing a heel
into the sheets, a bare arm
up at the drapery tempered
with cochineal red. In this Sistine
pendentive, Judith and her hand-
maid carry the artist's head away
on a dish, buckle at the knee
as if unable to bear fully the weight
of a skull hewn from the whole
of a man. On the mural opposite,
Michelangelo offers his skin
to the Last Judgment, hangs his face
elastic, lacking eyes or mass,
upon a martyr's fingertips. All
around the Redeemer, bodies vault
towards the clamor of heaven, plead
with their thresh and flail to render
themselves apart from the damned,
rowed towards a waiting maw.
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These are the men Vesalius halves
and digs into: criminals fresh
from the Paduan gallows, gifts
of the executioner's axe. Unfolding
the heads of petty thieves, he laces
what nerves and veins he finds
within their sutures into a crown
shooting skyward. He figures
a new man from their bared
tributaries, writes of arteries
as latticework. When the anatomist
poses for his portrait, he instructs
apprentices to draw him directly
from nature, beside a body opened
at the wrist, his fingers gracing
the exposed vessels of the lower arm.
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WESCHLER RESPONDS.
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Another superb entry from our friend the poet R.A. Villanueva (who careful contest aficionados will remember from winning entry #33, the diabolically clever "Lithographica"). Readers of the poem will likely want to see Judith and her handmaid carrying Michelangelo's own head away on a dish on the wall opposite the Last Judgment:
And perhaps a detail of the artist's flayed skin hanging from the martyr's (St Bartholomew) fingertips to Christ's lower left in the Judgment itself:
And perhaps as well the specific portrait of Vesalius palming the dissected corpse's exposed lower arm:
With regard to this last, which graced the first edition of Vesalius's masterwork, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, printed in Basel in 1543, it is thought to be the work of Jan van Calcar, who was also responsible for the frontispiece which Mr. Villanueva so powerfully pairs with the Michelangelo Last Judgment above. The flayed hand in the etched portrait is in turn, of course, reminiscent of the similarly flayed arm in Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of just under a century later (1632).
Indeed so much so that one is given to wonder whether Rembrandt had the Vesalius portrait in mind (he would have certainly known of the legendary book). I myself discussed the flayed hand in the Rembrandt painting in some detail in Everything that Rises (pp. 171-7). Suffice it to say here that in both portraits, the artist in question keys in on the marvels inherent in the musculature of arm and hand, the very appendages that make portraiture itself possible.
As for Mr. Villanueva's original comparison of the Michelangelo Sistine Last Judgment, finished in 1541, with van Calcer's frontispiece for Vesalius's De Humani Corporis, published just two years later, I would simply concur in his observation, conveyed in a subsequent communication, of the uncanny rhymes in terms of physical placement within their respective images, of Christ with his arm upraised in the Michelangelo and the death skeleton with its arm upraised in the van Calcer; and likewise Michelangelo's flayed body in the Last Judgment, with the dissected corpse splayed on the tabletop in the van Calcer. In its earliest days, modern anatomy took shape in a world still profoundly infused with eschatological anxiety: the anatomist probing in the viscera of a corpse whose soul had already departed toward final judgment. (Would body and soul ever be reunited, and if so, what of all the violence being done to these specific bodies, albeit those of criminals?)
Speaking of last judgments, it's worth noting that Michelangelo and Vesalius were virtually exact contemporaries. Michelangelo was born in 1475 in Tuscany; Vesalius was born just under forty years later in 1514, in Brussels. But both died, within months of each other, in 1564, Michelangelo in February, aged ninety, and Vesalius, on October 15, drowned in a shipwreck during a return voyage following a pilgrimage to Jerusalem!
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OTHER WINNERS.
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1. Evolving, Evolved by Charlie Hopper
2. Primal Forces, Basic Colors by Andy Hunter
3. The End of the Beginning by Holly Dunsworth
Intermezzo by Lawrence Weschler
4. This Is Not an Ad by Jimmy Chen
5. Catskills Vagina by Dan Clem
6. The Antipodes by Chris Zic
7. Self-Made Constriction by Sam Gaskin
8. We Are the Son by Danny Erker
9. Painfully Unaware by Dan Park
10. Gutshot by Jason Torchinsky
Weschler's Second Interlude
11. Love and War by Kim Wood
12. Inside and Out There by Lena Webb
13. The March by Emily Marvosh
14. Feminine Divine Triptych by Margit Christenson
15. Time's Deliberate Convergence by Steve Denyszyn
16. A Rousseau/Hirshfield Convergence by Adam Webb
Beirut/Warsaw by Lawrence Weschler
17. Clothesline Raising Over Carlisle, Indiana by Charlie Hopper
Carnival of Convergences
Weschler's Fourth Interlude
Aftersquib to the Foregoing
18. Pelvises All the Way Down by John Peter Rickgauer
19. Ovary Night? by Maya Muñoz
20. Christ in Space by Jonathan Shipley
A Pair of Convergences Off of Tina Barney
Another Carnival of Convergences
21. Moral Confusion: Iraq, Munich, and Vietnam by Donald Rumsfeld
22. Seeing the Tree for the Forest by Walter Murch
An Addendum to the Foregoing, and a Visitor Challenge
23, 24, and 25. Far Out by Michael Benson, Brian Christian, and Walter Murch
26. Jewish Bunk Beds by Monica S. Bland
Those Damn Swedish Trees, Take 3: Convergence of the Blogs
27. Degenerate Boogie-Woogie by Lisa Lee
Carnival of Convergences No. 3
28. Sand and Moon by Alison Cornyn
Actaeon: An Ovidian Impromptu by Lawrence Weschler
29 and 30. Hoods and Veils by Vero Testa and Lauren Redniss
The Onion/Bickle Convergence by Lawrence Weschler
31. The Lone Figure Against the Armored Swarm by Michele Siegel
32. Muscle and Flow by Benjamin R. Cohen
An Addendum to the Foregoing: Cities, Brains, Orchestras by Lawrence Weschler
Saint and Princess by Lawrence Weschler
Beauty Queen and Baghdad Hummer by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 4
Laughing, Clapping, Constantly Forgetting: A Trill of Readerly Associations by Lawrence Weschler
33. Lithographica by R.A. Villanueva
34. Papal Fire (Papa Lux) by Nick Feia
Addendum to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and, More Specifically, to the Stalinist-Applause Anecdote by Lawrence Weschler
35. Disseminations: Internet, Dandelions, Flight Paths by Sarah Daegling
36. Black and White and in Color by Walter Murch
Carnival of Convergences No. 5
Lee Friedlander's Visionary Trees: An Addendum to the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler
37. Shipwrecked Desperation by Charles Mudede via Matt Haber
38. Life Forms by Ariel Winter
Cameras, Action! From Disney World to St. Peter's Square, the Mediative Flight From the Immediate by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 6
Convergent Postscripts by Lawrence Weschler
From Da Vinci to Duchamp, by Way of Russia by Lawrence Weschler
Venus on a Vespa, Berger on My Mind by Lawrence Weschler
39. Eggs and Bacon by Rosamond Purcell
40. Vegetable Matters by Eli Horowitz
Slumdog Oedipus by Lawrence Weschler
41. Michelangelo/Vesalius by R.A. Villanueva
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