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September 10, 2014
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Glendon Mellow is a fine artist, illustrator and tattoo designer working in oil and digital media based in Toronto, Canada. He tweets @FlyingTrilobite. You can see Glendon's work-in-progress at The Flying Trilobite blog and portfolio at www.glendonmellow.com. Follow on Twitter @symbiartic.
Dividing Light from the Darkness, Michelangelo. Image uploaded to Wikipedia, click image for specific references.
University and scientific research center programs are increasingly finding it useful to employ artists and illustrators to help them see things in a new way. Few works of art from the Renaissance have been studied and pored over as meticulously as Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel. Yet, the Master may still have some surprises hidden for an illustrator-scientist.
Biomedical Illustrator Ian Suk (BSc, BMC) and Neurological Surgeon Rafael Tamargo (MD, FACS), both of Johns Hopkins proposed in a 2010 article in the journal Neurosurgery, that the panel above, Dividing Light from the Darkness by Michelangelo actually depicts the brain stem of God.
All images from the paper itself and comparison rights belong to Suk and Tamargo.
Using a series of comparisons of the unusual shadows and contours on God’s neck to photos of actual brain stems, the evidence seems completely overwhelming that Michelangelo used his own limited anatomical studies to depict the brain stem. It’s unlikely even the educated members of Michelangelo’s audience would recognize it. I encourage you to look over the paper here, and enlarge the images in the slideshow: Suk and Tamargo are utterly convincing. Unlike R. Douglas Fields in this previous blog post from 2010 on Scientific American, I don’t think there’s room to believe this is a case of pareidolia.
I imagine the thrill of feeling Michelangelo communicating directly with the authors across the centuries was immense.
Links:
For the third year running, we are turning September into a month-long celebration of science artists by delivering new sciart to invade your eyeballs. The SciArt Blitz! Can’t get enough? Check out what was previously featured on this day:
2013: The Drawings Behind Charles R. Knight’s Famous Paintings
2012: Coronal Mass Ejection from NASA
About the Author: Glendon Mellow is a fine artist, illustrator and tattoo designer working in oil and digital media based in Toronto, Canada. He tweets @FlyingTrilobite. You can see Glendon's work-in-progress at The Flying Trilobite blog and portfolio at www.glendonmellow.com. Follow on Twitter @symbiartic.
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This is something like a zillion percent beyond hilarious. For a TOTAL RETURN to REALITY, Michelangelo actually had an old man pose for him so he could then get every part of the images as accurate as possible. And, that old man had a very odd throat, which actually did look like it does in the painting.
For a dose of reality also, Michelangelo had a habit of painting upside down, and because of that, when he looks at the man’s throat, he forgot to reverse the painting. So, if you look VERY closely you can actually see how convoluted it is, and totally upside down. NO KIDDING.
As for one more thing, he also repeated this process of upside downness 36 times in his painting life, and was only caught one time when a female told him very politely that her view of her own breasts that were viewed in an upside down view of hers, matched EXACTLY to the upside down breasts in another one of his paintings.
One more thing, is that he also did another type of reversal where he sculpted a statue from marble, and a stone that cannot be corrected after a mistake is done, by sculpting a male’s hand that was under the main body, and where he had to lay on his back to do the work, totally backwards.
So, the brain stem thing is a joke, but, not all that oddly either. If he had any idea as to what one looked like, who knows where he might have upside-downed one of those. But, it wasn’t here.
Link to thisSJCrum, you know what’s a zillion percent awesome? Links to sources. Names of books and authors.
*Could* it be a case of pareidolia? Wishful thinking by someone with neuroanatomy on their own mind? Perhaps. You sure haven’t convinced me. NO KIDDING.
Link to this