Historia corporis humani sive Anatomice (review)

Alessandro Benedetti. Historia corporis humani sive Anatomice. Introduced, translated, and edited by Giovanna Ferrari. Biblioteca della Scienza italiana, no. 21. Florence: Giunti, 1998. 365 pp. L 55,000.00 (paperbound).

When Alessandro Benedetti was born in the province of Verona about the middle of the fifteenth century (perhaps at Legnago Fortezza, as his earliest biographers contend), its capital city and episcopal see was in the throes of an enormous transition. Verona, like Padua, had been conquered by Venice about 1404, and the Veronese were striving to emulate all things Venetian. Eager to erase the medieval aspect of their city, architects--for example, the gifted Fra Giocondo--were designing buildings that rivaled the palaces of the Grand Canal, and Veronese painters such as Girolamo dai Libri were decorating them with Venetian-style frescoes. Engineers were erecting fortifications that would make sixteenth-century Verona the strategic key to Northern Italy. The strongly fortified city built on the banks of the serpentine Adige was rapidly becoming the second most beautiful and militarily important city in the Venetia.

But Benedetti was never satisfied with second best. Though he acquired most of his early education in Verona before transferring to Padua, where he earned his medical degree, he soon shifted his allegiance to Venice, then the leading maritime state in Christendom. When he arrived, the city of the lagoons was outwardly enjoying the most splendid period of her history. As he was to discover (if never fully realize), however, her power was already waning. Benedetti served Venice as a physician abroad, spending sixteen years in Greece, the Dalmatian Coast, and Crete, territories that were soon to be lost to the Turks. In July 1495, the Venetian Senate sent him as surgeon general to the troops it had united to oppose the French armies of Charles VIII. He recorded his experiences during this service, in Diaria de Bello Carolino (Diary of the Caroline War), which affords insights not only into that campaign but into the character of its author.

Despite the Diaria's contemporaneous printing by the Aldine press, Benedetti was not a man of the future. He neither foresaw nor appreciated the technologic and intellectual revolution that was soon to engulf his world. Neither did he realize that the defeat of the Italian League at Fornovo was the beginning of the end for the Republic of Venice, whose connections had always been not with the rest of Italy, but with the East and Germany. These influences penetrate even the first pages of Benedetti's anatomical treatise. Rather than looking to Padua, where the first inklings of an anatomical revolution were beginning to surface, he sought inspiration in the classical world, and especially Greece. His study of human anatomy is thoroughly Hellenistic, as its Greek title, Anatomice, indicates. Aristotelian teleology and Platonic and Aristotelian references permeate the work, whose most original feature is the incorporation of classical anatomical terminology derived from the recently published Onomasticon of Julius Pollux.

Dedicated to the German emperor, Maximilian I (pp. 76-81), Benedetti's treatise is a descriptive anatomy, not a dissection manual. It is divided into five books, beginning with general remarks on anatomy, focusing on the teleological implications of the body, the qualities of the humors, and the names of the members and their functions. Book 2 contains discussions of the "natural members," the internal organs below the diaphragm; book 3, the spiritual members above the diaphragm; book 4, the head and the intellect; and finally, book 5, the members that pass throughout the body, such as the veins, arteries, and muscles.

Though Benedetti praises anatomical studies and advocates the construction of a temporary dissecting theater (chap. 1, pp. 84-85), there is little evidence that he performed many dissections himself. His work contains no original anatomical findings, and one has the impression that dissection for Benedetti was more of a performance than a research effort. Despite the changing world in which he lived, he...