The Olmec Heart Effigy: Earliest Image of the Human Heart

THE OLMEC HEART EFFIGY: EARLIEST IMAGE OF THE HUMAN HEART GORDON BENDERSKY* Introduction Heretofore, the earliest images of an anatomically defined human heart, recognizable by virtue of the component parts of its anatomical configuration and not by context, were those in the sixth book of Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica, published 1543 (Fig. 1) [I]. As a result of a survey of illustrations of the heart throughout prehistoric and historic times, as well as inspection of the recent exhibit of Olmec art at The Art Museum, Princeton University (Fig. 2) [2], it has now become apparent that the earliest anatomically defined human heart is 2500 years earlier than the work of Vesalius, the founder of modern anatomy [3] . This unprecedented Olmec effigy is also the earliest example of an internal organ so highly magnified in scale relative to the human body. Images of the hearts ofvarious mammals have been created for approximately 30,000 years, with innumerable meanings and diverse purposes. In pre-Renaissance times, these representations were uniformly stylized, becoming symbols of the heart rather than precise illustrations, and they have been defined by their context or customary usage rather than by multiple and characteristic visual features. Frequently these early depictions of the heart were discernible by the location of the organ at mid-thorax in figurai art or as a combination of general shape and location in contrast to the illustration of anatomical particulars. The earliest mammalian heart with this simplified picture is the extraordinary Paleolithic El Pindal Cave mammoth or elephant, located in Asturias, Northern Spain, where the heart is The author gratefully acknowledges Carolyn Tate, co-curator and co-author of The Olmec World, Ritual and Rulership, for her help in clarifying his arguments and directing him to Mesoamerican research sources, and for her critical commentary on the initial draft of this article. "¦Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, MCP-Hahnemann School of Medicine, 623 Anthony Road, Elkins Park, PA 19027.© 1997 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/97/4003-1011$01.00 348 Cordon Bendersky ¦ The Olmec Heart Effigy Fig. 1.—Vesalius' portrayal of the anterior view of the heart, 1543. Drawn from plates 64 and 89 of the Fabrica, demonstrating vena cava, aorta, pulmonary artery, and coronary vessels. painted on the shoulder or within the thorax in "false transparency" (Fig. 3A) [4, 5]. Other renderings of the heart include the Middle Egyptian hieroglyph (Fig. 3B), starting approximately 2000 bc [6-8]. Although it is not known whether this glyph of the heart is derived from a human or bull, the configuration remained fairly uniform for 20 centuries or longer. In ancient Greco-Roman and Etruscan times, the heart acquired a conventionalized form which may be the prototype of the traditional Valentine card symbol (Fig. 3C) [9] ; however, the actual origins of this symbol may lie in a botanical form, fashioned from the vine leaf of the same approximate configuration . The creative impulse in these early years appears to have been motivated by hunting, religious, linguistic, or artistic intentions. Nevertheless, these stereotypes were nonspecific, similar to those used to represent the sacrum and segments of the nervous system in medical depictions (Fig. 4). In the Han dynasty (206 bc to ad 25), the Chinese formed a schematic rather than naturalistic heart (Fig. 5) [10]. Regardless of the fact that some human post-mortem dissection was perPerspectives in Biology and Medicine, 40, 3 ¦ Spring 1997 349 Fig. 2A.—Olmec heart-shaped effigy vessel, 900-1200 bc, the oldest independently recognized image ofthe heart; demonstrating pulmonary artery, aorta, superior vena cava, interventricular succus and two ventricles. Photograph ©Justin Kerr 1995 K6042 courtesy FAMSI 930055 [2]. formed in ancient Greece and again in Bologna in the early 14th century ad [11, 12], no definitive pictures of the heart originating from anatomical study for didactic purposes have survived from these eras. In the 15th century ad sculpture The Heart of the Miser by Donatello, the heart is an illdefined organ and is determined to be cardiac only because of the context: the story of St. Anthony and the "heart" found in a money box. On the other hand, Leonardo da Vinci, who has been...