ABSTRACT
Our understanding of the body-interior in the Renaissance tends to be subsumed (for understandable reasons) by the representation of the body-exterior. The dazzling displays in high Renaissance and Baroque art of volumetric proportion – of bodies which possess depth and substance as though they were alive but frozen in time – has tended to blind us to the construction of an interior body-space. But for the artists of the period, certainly, the discovery of interior space was as important as the ability to render surfaces into convincing registers of depth. Failure to understand the disposition of the body’s interior, they argued, would render all attempts at depicting its exterior futile. Conversely, the surface should suggest an interior. Vasari, in his life of Michelangelo, stressed this transaction between surface and depth. Describing Michelangelo’s Pietà in Rome, for example, Vasari thrilled to the interior anatomy of the dead Christ:
It would be impossible to find a body showing greater mastery of art and possessing more beautiful members, or a nude with more detail in the muscles, veins, and nerves stretched over their framework of bones, or a more deathly corpse. 1
