ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the classical distinction between art and nature that, in its various meanings, constituted the background for several concepts and practices of the sciences of men, plants, and gardens. It discusses the many contradictions and oscillations concerning the natural-artificial opposition that are to be found in Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s book and the respective roles of the human artifex and of nature in this surgery procedure. The surgeon made precise reference to the analogical correspondence between human skin and bark and placed humans within a cosmological continuum including plants and animals. Tagliacozzi presented human grafting as a variation on plant grafting, whose history was old and dignified by the great men who were able to extract norms out of a fortunate observation of natural phenomena. Tagliacozzi’s map of analogies between plants and humans came from a long way and had broad cultural resonances.
