Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Giorgio Vasari

  • Strabismo di Venere—Michelangelo’s David

    Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, United States It is one of the most recognizable sculptures in Western art, the work of an acclaimed Renaissance artist. For over 600 years, it has been viewed by millions of tourists and by millions more in photographs or books. Yet until recently, an obvious physical abnormality had gone largely unrecognized.…

  • Ghirlandaio, humanism, and truth: The portrait of an elderly man and young boy

    Vincent P. de LuiseNew Haven, Connecticut, United States “. . . There is no more human a picture in the entire rangeof Quattrocento painting, whether in or out of Italy . . .”– Bernard Berenson Among the defining characteristics of the Renaissance were humanism and naturalism. While many Renaissance paintings and sculptures were depictions of…

  • Andrea del Sarto – plague in Florence

    “The siege being finished . . . . Florence became filled with soldiers and stores from the camp. Among those soldiers were some mercenaries sick of the plague, who brought no little terror into the city and shortly afterwards left it infected. Thereupon, either through this apprehension or through some imprudence in eating after having…

  • Fra Bartolommeo

    Madonna and child 1514–16 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria Girolamo Savanarola 1498 Museo di San Marco, Florence, Italy Fra Bartolommeo (1472–1517), also known as Baccio della Porta, was a Florentine Renaissance painter and Dominican friar, active in Florence, Venice, and Rome. His work being largely religious in nature, his paintings Madonna and Child and Girolamo Savanarola…

  • Piero di Cosimo

    Piero di Cosimo was a highly eccentric Florentine painter (ca. 1461-1521) whose best known paintings are quite idiosyncratic. His mythological paintings exhibit a bizarre style, many filled with fantastic humans and animals. Perseus frees Andromeda, ca. 1513 Oil on wood Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy   . . . it appeared that he had lived the…

  • Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist

    Applying himself to the study of anatomy, “Leonardo composed a book annotated in pen and ink in which he did meticulous drawings in red chalk of bodies he had dissected himself. He showed all the bone structure, adding in order all the nerves and covering them with muscles: the first attached to the skeleton, the…