Animated meditations on mortality: the work of Andrew Carnie

Representations of the human body provide the main narrative thread within the history of art. From rudimentary Neolithic fertility goddesses to the idealized physiques of the classical tradition, visual artists were celebrated (and sometimes reviled) for their quasi-miraculous ability to simulate an aspect of life, so providing images by which some existential truth might be grasped. Renaissance masters such as Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) worked as anatomists who revolutionized understanding of bodily structure. For at least four centuries after that, however, the detailed appreciation of life far outstripped the capacity of medical science for beneficial intervention, and anatomy served more as the edifying grammar of medical education than as a basis for effective experimental science.