Category: Art Flashes
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Bush medicine leaves
Rose TaskerAdelaide, Australia The leaves of the Kurrajong, or Kurrawong tree (Brachychiton1) have been captured in several paintings by Australian Aboriginal women artists. These stylistic and iconic paintings first gained international attention in 1999, when one work by Gloria Petyarre (1945 – ) won the Australian “Wynne Prize” for landscape. Pictured here, the winning piece,…
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The doctor and the doll
Ravi ShankarAruba, Kingdom of the Netherlands Norman Rockwell, one of the most famous American artists of the twentieth century, depicted ordinary American life from an optimistic perspective. He once stated that he did not portray the ugly and the sordid, but portrayed life as he would like it to be. One of his paintings, Doctor…
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Taste buds
Pinky TripathiVaranasi, Uttar Pradesh, India The sense of taste evolved in the earliest vertebrates, subject to different interpretation by organisms. Taste is mediated through taste buds, each supported by a narrow connective tissue papilla from the underlying tissues through which the taste buds get their nerve and blood supply. Each taste bud has a small…
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Anatomical Heart Illustration #1 and #2
Paul RoopraiHamilton, Ontario, Canada Artist statement Anatomical Heart Illustration #1 and #2 are digital renderings created in Adobe Photoshop CS6. The artworks are personally meaningful to me and were inspired by a woman I met in a volunteer placement while in the Health Sciences program at McMaster University. The patient suffered a stroke and a…
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Giorgione and the plague
Giorgione’s painting Il Tramonto (The Sunset) is as mysterious as most of the other details of the artist’s life. Painted around 1506, it was lost and rediscovered in 1933 in a villa near Venice, in very poor condition, damaged, and with holes in it. Over time it underwent three restorations. The holes were covered with…
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Paradise Lost – John Milton
Before his final expulsion from paradise Adam was taken to the highest mountain in the garden, where the archangel Michael showed him what misery the future will bring to man: Immediately a placeBefore his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark;A lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laidNumbers of all diseased; all maladiesOf ghastly spasm, or racking…
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Mantegna’s coral aorta
At first sight this coral in Andrea Mantegna’s painting looks like an abdominal aorta, the Superior Mesenteric Artery arising at its upper end, other branches from lower down. Corals are the products of minute marine sack-like organisms that live in compact colonies or reefs, secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton, and may grow…
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Saint Peter and Hansen’s disease?
Did Saint Peter have leprosy, or perhaps some other cause of injury to the ulnar nerve? It would seem so, according to Dr. Bennett Futterman, professor of anatomy in New York. In a recent book he points out that the traditional blessing of the Pope—ring and little finger bent inward as in the clawhand deformity…
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Hospital at Arles – Van Gogh, 1889
The famous Impressionist painter Van Gogh has had much personal experience with hospitals and asylums, admitted repeatedly in Arles and St Rémy for episodes of mental illness. Over 150 psychiatrists have variously attributed his mental condition to schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, syphilis, temporal lobe epilepsy, acute porphyria, or heavy metal poisoning—aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia, alcohol,…