Solmsen Fellow (2024–2025)
Assistant Professor, Art + Art History, University of Connecticut
Early Modern Anatomies and the Arboreal Body
In the early modern period, the human body and its systems were often compared to trees, with the lungs, veins, and arteries likened to the ramifications of roots and branches. By the first decades of the sixteenth century, this association between human and arboreal bodies began to extend beyond the merely metaphorical. Medical practitioners recognized that the subtractive technique used to create wooden printing blocks for the new genre of the illustrated anatomy allied closely with the process of dissecting and interpreting the human body: in both instances, the craftsperson or physician freed a design from a biological substrate to render it visible and intelligible.
But how might the concurrent refinement of woodblock printing and anatomical study have informed one another at this moment? This seminar will consider a variety of materials—ranging from vernacular anatomical sheets to Andreas Vesalius’s atlas of the human body—to explore the relationship between early modern printmaking technology and anatomical knowledge. This study forms the basis for a chapter of my book in progress, Material Matrix, which examines key inflection points in the histories of printmaking and scientific visualization.
Elizabeth Athens is an art historian at the University of Connecticut with research interests in the connections between art and science, the art of empire, and the history of collecting. Before coming to UConn she worked at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC, contributing to the digital humanities resource History of Early American Landscape Design, and served as the curator of American art at the Worcester Art Museum. While at Worcester she reinterpreted the museum’s portrait galleries to draw attention to the practice of slavery in New England, a project that garnered national and international recognition. She also organized the traveling exhibition Coming Away: Winslow Homer and England and co-authored its catalogue. Athens’s most recent publication, William Bartram’s Visual Wonders (University of Pittsburgh Press), examines the graphic practice of this eighteenth-century artist and naturalist. Her research has been published in The Oxford Art Journal, History of Photography, and J18: A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture.
*Events currently open only to 2024–25 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*