Between Fabrica and Theatre: The Long Life of the Anatomical Model in Culture

What is it about?

This Introduction examines how anatomy has influenced European culture far beyond the realm of medicine. From the Renaissance onward, anatomical thinking became a powerful way of understanding not only the human body, but also knowledge, art, literature, architecture, and the self. At the centre of the volume is the idea of a “Civilisation of Anatomy”, which emerged in the sixteenth century with figures such as Andreas Vesalius. Dissection was not simply a medical practice: it offered a method based on cutting, ordering, and showing, shaping how early modern culture produced and organised knowledge. Anatomy thus became a shared language across science and the humanities. The encompassing book highlights the close interaction between anatomy, literature, and the visual arts. Anatomical knowledge developed through images, rhetoric, and spatial design as much as through observation. This is especially clear in the genre of literary anatomies, widespread in seventeenth-century Italy, where the logic of dissection was applied to morality, politics, knowledge, and the soul. To “anatomise” meant to break a subject into parts in order to understand it fully. A key focus is the relationship between anatomy and architecture. Bodies were compared to buildings, and buildings to bodies; this analogy found its most striking expression in anatomical theatres, spaces that combined scientific demonstration with public spectacle. Over time, these theatres evolved into museums, where wax models, prints, and other “substitute bodies” replaced the dissected corpse and made anatomical knowledge accessible to wider audiences—while also provoking enduring reactions of fascination and unease. Finally, the essay traces the long-term legacy of the anatomical model into modern and contemporary culture. Anatomy became a metaphor for literary criticism, urban theory, and artistic practice, and continues to shape how bodies and spaces are represented today. In this perspective, anatomy appears not only as a science of the body, but as a cultural framework for seeing, ordering, and reflecting on ourselves.

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Why is it important?

The volume encompassing our Introduction is important because it shows that anatomy is not only a medical practice, but a cultural model that has shaped how knowledge, art, architecture, and literature have been produced from the early modern period to today. By bringing together science and the humanities, it reveals anatomy as a shared language of analysis, representation, and visual thinking. The book highlights the long-term impact of dissection as a way of seeing, ordering, and interpreting both bodies and texts.

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