ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Alessandro Allori's Ragionamenti delle regole del disegno (Discussions of the rules of drawing, c. 1560) to explore how anatomical knowledge influenced early modern ideas of physical beauty. Like Vincenzo Danti, Giovanni Battista Armenini and Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Allori believed that an understanding of the skeleton was fundamental to artistic training. However, his concept of beauty as the harmonious exterior of a well-proportioned body, as opposed to a disfigured corpse, reveals a tension between aesthetic ideal and anatomical enquiry. Allori's references to the melancholy of bones ( malinconiche ossa ) highlight this ambivalence, linking artistic instruction to moral and emotional contemplation. Drawing on Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven books on the fabric of the human body, 1543) and the medical expertise of Alessandro Menchi da Montevarchi, Allori situated the artist's study of the human body within a broader epistemic framework, aligning drawing with scientific knowledge.
