Historia corporis humani sive Anatomice (review)

Ynez Violé O'Neill

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 74, Number 3, Fall 2000,pp. 596-597 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/bhm.2000.0114

For additional information about this article

Access provided by your local institution (8 Aug 2013 06:32 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bhm/summary/v074/74.3oneill.html

BOOK REVIEWS Bull. Hist. Med., 2000, 74596

Alessandro Benedetti. Historia corporis humani sive Anatomice. Introduced, trans-lated, and edited by Giovanna Ferrari. Biblioteca della Scienza italiana, no. 21.Florence: Giunti, 1998. 365 pp. L 55,000.00 (paperbound).

When Alessandro Benedetti was born in the province of Verona about the middleof the fifteenth century (perhaps at Legnago Fortezza, as his earliest biographerscontend), its capital city and episcopal see was in the throes of an enormoustransition. Verona, like Padua, had been conquered by Venice about 1404, andthe Veronese were striving to emulate all things Venetian. Eager to erase themedieval aspect of their city, architects—for example, the gifted Fra Giocondo—were designing buildings that rivaled the palaces of the Grand Canal, andVeronese painters such as Girolamo dai Libri were decorating them with Vene-tian-style frescoes. Engineers were erecting fortifications that would make six-teenth-century Verona the strategic key to Northern Italy. The strongly fortifiedcity built on the banks of the serpentine Adige was rapidly becoming the secondmost beautiful and militarily important city in the Venetia.

But Benedetti was never satisfied with second best. Though he acquired mostof his early education in Verona before transferring to Padua, where he earnedhis medical degree, he soon shifted his allegiance to Venice, then the leadingmaritime state in Christendom. When he arrived, the city of the lagoons wasoutwardly enjoying the most splendid period of her history. As he was to discover(if never fully realize), however, her power was already waning. Benedetti servedVenice as a physician abroad, spending sixteen years in Greece, the DalmatianCoast, and Crete, territories that were soon to be lost to the Turks. In July 1495,the Venetian Senate sent him as surgeon general to the troops it had united tooppose the French armies of Charles VIII. He recorded his experiences duringthis service, in Diaria de Bello Carolino (Diary of the Caroline War), which affordsinsights not only into that campaign but into the character of its author.

Despite the Diaria’s contemporaneous printing by the Aldine press, Benedettiwas not a man of the future. He neither foresaw nor appreciated the technologicand intellectual revolution that was soon to engulf his world. Neither did herealize that the defeat of the Italian League at Fornovo was the beginning of theend for the Republic of Venice, whose connections had always been not with therest of Italy, but with the East and Germany. These influences penetrate even thefirst pages of Benedetti’s anatomical treatise. Rather than looking to Padua,where the first inklings of an anatomical revolution were beginning to surface, hesought inspiration in the classical world, and especially Greece. His study ofhuman anatomy is thoroughly Hellenistic, as its Greek title, Anatomice, indicates.Aristotelian teleology and Platonic and Aristotelian references permeate thework, whose most original feature is the incorporation of classical anatomicalterminology derived from the recently published Onomasticon of Julius Pollux.

Dedicated to the German emperor, Maximilian I (pp. 76–81), Benedetti’streatise is a descriptive anatomy, not a dissection manual. It is divided into five

BOOK REVIEWS Bull. Hist. Med., 2000, 74 597

books, beginning with general remarks on anatomy, focusing on the teleologicalimplications of the body, the qualities of the humors, and the names of themembers and their functions. Book 2 contains discussions of the “natural mem-bers,” the internal organs below the diaphragm; book 3, the spiritual membersabove the diaphragm; book 4, the head and the intellect; and finally, book 5, themembers that pass throughout the body, such as the veins, arteries, and muscles.

Though Benedetti praises anatomical studies and advocates the construction ofa temporary dissecting theater (chap. 1, pp. 84–85), there is little evidence that heperformed many dissections himself. His work contains no original anatomicalfindings, and one has the impression that dissection for Benedetti was more of aperformance than a research effort. Despite the changing world in which he lived,he never appreciated innovations. His anatomical treatise contains no illustrations,though he was surrounded by artists and by printers who could have createdaccurate depictions of the structures he described. For historians who seek to studyworks that preceded Vesalius’s Fabrica, Benedetti’s Anatomice is an object lesson.

To appreciate this object lesson, readers of English have for years had L. R.Lind’s fine translation of the Anatomice.1 The Latin text that Lind used, however,has never been easily accessible in this country, even in large research libraries. Inaddition to reviewing the scholarly literature on Benedetti since 1975, GiovannaFerrari now provides us with a Latin text on pages facing her lively Italian version.This elegantly designed and printed volume will provide an excellent tool for thefurther study of pre-Vesalian anatomy. Students of literary humanism may beinterested to find that Benedetti, like the architects and fresco painters of hisnative Verona, applied a classical façade to traditional—or, as he would havedeplored, essentially medieval—material.

Ynez Violé O’NeillUCLA School of Medicine

1. L. R. Lind, “The History of the Human Body by Alessandro Benedetti of Verona,Physician,” in idem, Studies in Pre-Vesalian Anatomy: Biography, Translations, Documents (Phila-delphia: American Philosophical Society, 1975), pp. 82–137.