- So this is the flesh suit or the muscle suit.
And here is the back.
More legal than grave robbing.
(upbeat music)
Hi, I'm Jessie.
I'm a science-y math kind of person.
And yet I work at the Getty.
Famous for its art and culture.
Ooh, Hercules.
So I decided to go on a quest to learn about art
and discover all I can about becoming artsy.
Anatomical illustrations are such a cool intersection
of art and science.
And so it's no surprise that I immediately returned
to the Getty Research Institute
when I heard about their new special exhibition
called Flesh and Bones.
And of course, because I always have a million questions,
I recruited Thisbe Gensler to give me my own personal tour.
Tell me about grave robbing.
- Oh my gosh, this is actually, yeah, this is a good one.
- Let me explain.
Human dissection was a huge part of the history of anatomy.
And a few hundred years ago,
we didn't have CT scans or MRIs or X-rays.
So scientists had to look inside of us
to figure out what's inside.
But where to get those bodies to look inside of.
- So the supply of cadavers was rare.
There was not a ton of bodies available
because there was a big taboo
against dissecting the human body.
There was fears of what that meant for your soul
in the afterlife.
And so the only sanctioned bodies for dissection
for a long time were those of executed criminals
already condemned.
And when there were not enough criminals to dissect
people would resort to grave robbing.
- Yes, grave robbing. - This was a common practice
all the way up until the 19th century
when certain laws started to officially determine
what bodies could be used for dissection,
including those that were unclaimed.
- But that wasn't even the worst of it.
In the 19th century, serial killers, Burke and Hare,
actually murdered people in order to sell the bodies.
So it's safe to say anatomy was a pretty hot subject.
And since there was no video or photography,
surgeons or anatomists often directed artists
to draw what they saw inside.
- Some anatomists were artists, themselves,
and they did their own drawings,
but many relied on an artist to turn their knowledge,
their scientific study, into an image
that could be shared, circulated.
The most fun ones are here. - Okay.
- This is the earliest piece in the entire exhibition.
This is the earliest Anatomy Atlas.
You can see these amazing figures
that are dissecting themselves.
They're pulling open their own skin,
they're flaying themselves so that you can see
which blood vessels to let for blood-letting.
Here, with these cadavers, they've been animated
so that they walk around, they occupy landscapes,
they have emotions.
- One of the most famous artworks we looked at
was the Albinus piece.
And Albinus, is that the name of artist?
- That is the anatomist.
Jan Wandelaar was the artist here.
One thing to note about Albinus' figures
are that they are an amalgamation
of several different bodies
so that they are the perfect proportion
and the perfect, ideal type.
This is not. - Oh my God, even back then
they were doing that?
- One of the tricks that this anatomist suggested,
is you hold your hand in a spy glass
and you just are supposed to look at it
and see the kind of, very edge of the figure
alongside the background.
It looks almost 3D, it's almost popping out.
- I don't know why that works but it works.
Animating a dead body, it connects us.
Kind of dark, cause then it's like,
um, I'm gonna be dead one day.
- Well, that in itself, is an enduring theme
of many of the early pieces in the show, actually.
We will all die one day and we all have bodies
and we're all interested to see ourselves in it.
- Next up is a great piece depicting a scene
from an artist academy.
- This is a print
from around the turn of the 17th century by Alberti.
And it shows an artist academy
where students are sketching from a skeleton,
as you can see.
And then in the back here,
they are actually performing a dissection.
- Long story short, but I learned during the Renaissance
that there was this resurgence of interest
in the ancient world,
including the precision in which ancient artists
could sculpt the human body.
- As you can see, there's a great interest in artists
to be able to represent the body.
An artist would be less concerned
about respiratory systems or nerves or viscera,
but what they are interested in is the skeletal systems
and also the muscles
- [Jessie] It was around this time that anatomy books
specifically for artists came out.
- They're for artists, but they were often cross-marketed
to medical students and artists at the same time.
There was a lot of crossover between these two markets.
(upbeat music)
- The anatomy books for artists
that came out during this period,
plus the advancements in technology
means we now have other ways to study the human body.
And speaking of, I was inspired to do just that.
Hendricks. - Oh, great.
We have you right here.
- Should I take multiple? - Yeah.
One for skeletal and one for muscular.
- It just so happened that the GRI was offering
this Flesh and Bones-inspired drawing class.
So I jumped on the opportunity.
Although instead of drawing to a flayed human body
with its skin stripped off, our model, Christina,
wore an impressive spandex muscle suit.
This is wild.
The class was taught by Peter Zokosky
with Christine in the muscle suit
plus a synthetic skeleton model.
But first I asked Peter, what is the benefit to an artist
of learning the placement of our muscle and bone?
- So much that you benefit from understanding
what the muscle is, what it does, where it's connecting,
how it's working.
And the more in tune you get with it,
the more you can see
that simply a thing like lifting this leg up.
There's a couple of muscles that are involved in that
and they'll start to stand up and you'll actually see it.
And another example is our sternocleidomastoid.
You turn your head and we've got this beautiful arrangement
where we've got a muscle that originates here,
inserts here, and so if I shorten that distance.
- Oh yeah, I can see. - I get that, yeah, exactly.
I get that muscle.
Part of it is just the sheer beauty of the design
is really profound.
- [Jessie] Peter's first tip when drawing is to prioritize.
- Get the big things down first,
the big shapes, big three dimensional forms,
understand how they interact and work rapidly.
- [Jessie] Peter also suggests
holding your pencil farther back than you think,
don't worry about mistakes, or be too careful.
And have fun.
After a few practice rounds,
Christina struck a pose for the class to draw.
(bright music)
After drawing the musculature,
the skeleton was set up in the same pose.
Ta da!
- [Thisbe] Going into gallery two.
- What are these guys? - These are stereoscopic
photographs, which means if you look through these viewers,
it will appear as a 3D image.
- [Jessie] Starting in the 19th century,
medical students could use stereo images like these
for reference with the 3D aspect
adding dimension and texture.
- Do you see it? - Yeah, yeah.
It's a, it's like a brain.
Another method of using 3D
to show details inside of our bodies
was the flap book, which was used as early as the 1530s.
Here, we have examples from multiple centuries
including a Johann Remmelin book
that lets you participate in a simulated dissection,
lifting tiny flaps of paper
to reveal deep structures of the body.
- What I really wanna show you is just around this corner.
- [Jessie] Whoa.
- [Thisbe] This is a contemporary example
of an artist using anatomy.
That is an imagined portrait of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr.
- [Jessie] This is a contemporary artwork
by Tavares Strachan, a former Getty artist in residence
who studies invisibility
looking at people who have been erased from history
or lost from the public consciousness.
- Robert Lawrence is exceptional because he was an astronaut
at a time when the tensions in America specifically
were so much so that to think of a black man as an astronaut
in 1966, '67, is quite fascinating.
I mean, this is at the height of civil rights in America.
- [Jessie] Tragically Robert died
during a training accident in 1967.
And so he never made it to space.
- [Thisbe] But Tavares actually made an art piece
where he sent him into orbit.
This is the only named Black figure
in this entire exhibition, as you probably noticed
walking around.
The most common default image for anatomical illustration
is a Caucasian male.
The women's bodies are typically used for reproductive.
- Sex. - Exactly.
If you wanna see pregnancy, here's a female body,
but otherwise you're gonna get a male body.
Right now, a lot of anatomical illustrators
are actually striving to change this
and they are working on producing images
that are more representative,
that have a diversity of body types, of skin colors.
- This is part of a very important
and rising health justice movement
to create textbooks and simulations
that represent all bodies.
All bodies.
- So if you think about the fact
that doctors are trained using images of white men,
there are implications for how they're gonna practice
out in the real world.
If you are used to seeing a skin disease
only represented on white skin,
then it's gonna be harder for you
to diagnose and identify it if it's on a darker skin type
of a real human body as opposed to these representations.
- Filming this episode taught me
how the interest in the human body encompassed
both science and art
from the anatomical illustrations of the Renaissance
to the 3D flat books of the 17th century
all the way to the health justice movement of today.
And the anatomical artist and illustrators
aiming to correct a history that left a lot of things out.
I hope you enjoyed this mini tour
of the Getty Research Institute's Flesh and Bones.
I gotta get back to drawing,
I feel like I'm losing light over here.
(upbeat music)
(music ends)