Art: Spectacular Bodies
Authors: S. Grant
Journal: BMJ (2000)

The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now

Hayward Gallery, London, until 14 January

A crucified figure hangs limp from a simple wooden cross. The flesh looks sinewy and pale. The face is gaunt and lifeless. This is not a painting but an anatomical work of art, made in 1801 by the royal academician Thomas Banks. The artist used the body of a criminal to make a plaster cast. Originally intended as a study to show how muscles sag under gravity, Anatomical Crucifixion has since become an iconic image showing how art and science were once happy bedfellows. 

If you saw this in the hallowed halls of a medical college you might rationally marvel at the engineering of the human body. But in the aesthetic confines of the Hayward Gallery the religious undertones and the beauty of the image become more disturbing. Damien Hirst's modern attempts at ecorches—figures in which muscles are represented stripped of skin—look like children's toys in comparison.

Banks's figure characterises how closely artists and the medical profession used to work, a theme running through “Spectacular Bodies” at the Hayward Gallery. The exhibition is a vast “pick and mix” display of 300 paintings, drawings, prints, objects, instruments, models, and photographs that aim to represent the human body through the combined disciplines of art and science. It is a history of crossovers, shared ideas, symbiosis, and eventual specialisation. Early group portraits show noble surgeons parading their medical knowledge with elitist pomp. There are scores of beautifully illustrated medical books and anatomical sculptures and waxworks revealing the inner workings of the human body.

For non-medics, Spectacular Bodies is more a cabinet of curiosities. When you remember that dissections in the operating theatre could be more popular than a night out at the theatre, the idea of the body as spectacle is not so absurd. One of the stars of the show is Clemente Susini, an Italian of the early 19th century who made wax models. He was a master at creating artistic and atmospheric dissections. His Head, trunk and left upper limb of an adult male with vessels and nerves (1804) was made with the loving care of a man hellbent on dramatising the violent beauty of our innards. Whether showing liver, kidney, intestines, or teeth, the delicate intricacy of Susini's figures suggest that these objects are as intent on inspiring divine ecstasy as on being factual additions to a medic's notebook.

These days, of course, things are done rather differently. The disciplines of medicine and art are more splintered and specialised than ever before. God is in his place. The more gory medical practices are confined to clinical, closed environments. Art is confined to art colleges, with life drawing virtually redundant. And although contemporary artists may borrow from science—as in the work of Christine Borland and John Isaacs, who are among the contemporary artists commissioned to make new works for the exhibition—the knowledge is rarely reciprocated. 

Spectacular Bodies is a fascinating exhibition that does a fine job in showing us how distanced we have become from the functions of our own bodies. There are, however, elements of the show that don't quite work. A good deal of the upstairs gallery is dedicated to early studies in physiognomy and pathognomy, including phrenological head casts, Francis Galton's photographs of patients at Bethlem Asylum, and Franz Messerschmidt's grimacing alabaster heads of 1775. Seen in isolation, they would hold their own, but in this context they veer too closely to the caricature drawings by Daumier and Hogarth that are hung nearby.

Large group exhibitions are flawed by nature, but there is enough material here to remind us that our bodies will always be messy and decaying pieces of flesh.