Christian K. Kleinbub: Michelangelo and the Poetics of the Inner Body

Although Michelangelo's command of human anatomy is widely acknowledged, his exploration of the body's internal organs has gone largely unnoticed. For while texts and drawings attest to Michelangelo use of dissection to explore the body's superficial anatomy, little or no evidence survives or has been adduced to show his interest in the body's interior. Yet, though it may seem that Michelangelo was simply uncurious about the internal organs, he in fact made reference to them everywhere. Indeed, he was deeply stimulated in his thinking about matters of interior anatomy, garnering much from seemingly eclectic sources, including theological and philosophical treatises and the works of the Tuscan poets like Dante and Petrarch. Considered again in light of these references, Michelangelo's bodies resonate externally and internally with poetic allusion and metaphor, and thus provide new insights into their meaning and the thinking of their maker.