ABSTRACT
Historians of plastic surgery tend to agree on the fact that such a monumental and innovative work as Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s De curtorum remained virtually without any following until the late eighteenth century. This chapter discusses the deep resonances of reconstructive surgery and Tagliacozzi’s method in two important branches of seventeenth-century medical and natural philosophical culture: teratology and the debate around mechanism and empiricism. Fortunio Liceti had studied arts and medicine in Bologna, where he had met Tagliacozzi as a teacher; he then moved to Padua, where he became professor of theoretical medicine. Liceti used Tagliacozzi’s principle of grafting to illustrate the monstrous potential of the combination of human shapes, also alluding to artificially created monsters made through the human art of grafting. Tagliacozzi’s work came to be considered an example of a tradition focused on rebirth and artificial life – dangerous or ridiculous fantasy of replicating or even improving upon nature’s creativity.
