The Problem of the Écorché: The Vesalian Corpus of Alessandro Allori

Compartmentalizing the influences of artist and anatomist on the cinquecento Florentine Academicians limits our ability to understand their practices and works as intersections of diverse influences. Separately addressing their influences clouds our modern understanding of the wholistic intellectual world in which these Florentine artists lived and worked. Such a view forces us into seeing artists as having only been influenced by artists, and, by extension, anatomists as having only been influenced by anatomists. By contrast, the reality of the day was that both groups were deeply influenced by each other. Through an examination of the Fabrica and two of Alessandro Allori's yet-unstudied sketches, I argue that Renaissance Humanism caused 16th-century art and medicine to converge into observational science, such that experimentation in naturalism led to mutual advancement of both fields. To this end, I show that Allori was intentionally placing his works in direct dialogue with illustrations from Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica. By examining this dialogue, I show how Allori both drew inspiration from and augmented the latter, demonstrating the influence of Vesalius' work upon Allori's, and by extension the Florentine Academicians', anatomical and artistic practices. The elevation and convergence of medical practice and manual artistic creation as intellectual science is illustrated by the anatomical sketch work of Alessandro Allori. His planned anatomical treatise is evidence of this prominence of Vesalius and his Fabrica in the daily life of the painter, and proof of the blurring of the lines between art and medicine in this period. That the artist was working to engage in constructive dialogue with and improve upon the work of the physician would have been unthinkable before Vesalius.