Bojana Cokić
Zajecar, Serbia

Oscar Wilde believed that life imitates art and that what we perceive is beautiful only because “art” has taught us to regard it as such. But if indeed “life is art,” as Maxim Gorki wrote, “to be found in all its beauty and joy,” then clearly life has been with us since time immemorial. It follows that art is best expressed, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote, not by making something new, but by telling the old in a new way.

This many great artists have achieved in various ways, and so have scientists. In the The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli displayed female beauty. Leonardo da Vinci, the ideal of the Renaissance man and a universal genius, was a great master of such effects, painting, for example, the fetus in the uterus. In one of his paintings, Salvador Dali imitated an electrocardiogram showing digitalis induced ST segment depression; and in Landscape of butterflies he painted the hereditary basis of life, DNA. In the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, Rembrandt painted a human body being dissected in all its stark reality.

Many other diseases and genetic syndromes have provided inspiration for artists and were shown in paintings many years before being described by physicians:

• John Langdon Down (1828-1896) described the Down syndrome in 1866, but this was painted in 1515 by an unknown Flemish painter in an Adoration of the Christ Child.
• Carreno de Miranda, a Spanish physician, painted in 1680 a girl with Prader-Willi syndrome (Eugenia Martinez Valleji) called La Monstrua Desnuda
• Dr. Harry Angelman, a pediatrician, described Angelman syndrome, shown by the Verona painter Giovanni Francesca Carota’s in the Puppet Children.
• Diego Velasquez, court painter to King Philip IV of Spain, painted dwarfs such as the jester Sebastian de Morra.