The Pink Shoe Diaries

I read a very interesting article on Boston.com the other day about hidden allusions to human anatomy in Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

(since someone has not uploaded the pictures from this weekend yet, I will blog about this.)

I'm sure that even if you are not too familiar with art, you are somewhat aware of the fact that the Sistine Chapel exists and that it contains very famous al fresco paintings by Michelangelo on its ceiling. Perhaps the most famous one would be "Creation of Adam"



Accoding to Dr Frank Meshberger, the figure of God and the surrounding angels is meant to look like the cross section of the human brain.

Another panel, entitled "The Seperation of Earth and Water" is said to show the cross section of a human kidney:



the most obvious anatomical allusion, according to the article, is depticted in the panel entitled "Cumaean Sybill".



if you look closely at the bag behind the Sybil


it closely resembles this textbook drawing of a human heart


the article mentions a few other hidden organs, and i looked them all up (and posted most here) and for the most part i could see what they were talking about. there was one that i absolutely could not see. supposedly if you look at the "Libyan Sibyl" upside down, you see a drawing the human arm bone, and the socket into which it fits on the shoulder



i can NOT see this one at all. can you?

in a way, you have to think that "you see what you want to see" and perhaps if you looked at any painting you could see an organ or the cross section of some kind of organ or whatnot. but at the same time, it's well known that Michelangelo, as well as many other renaissance artists (cough, cough, Da Vinci, cough) were obsessed with human anatomy, so it is plausable that some of their most famed work would contain tributes to this obsession.

i don't know, it's fun to check out anyway. if you want to read the article you can check it out here