ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates how the ordinariness of the male model, posed to recall the Apollo Belvedere. It provides a discrepancy between the anatomical lesson for the amateur artists underway in Adriaan De Lelie’s painting and the painter’s own treatment of the anatomical/artistic model. The book discusses Diego Rivera’s medical and public health imagery in several early twentieth-century murals in Mexico and the United States, and describes the creation, collection, and display of models of pathology in the so-called Musée Charcot. The book also discusses how the medical co-option in various forms of the popular photographic toy, the stereoscope, which created the illusion of a three-dimensional image for the viewer, resulted in what is known as stereoscopic radiography—the creation of theoretically more precise three-dimensional X-ray images.
