Panorama of the World: Imaginary anatomy and art

The basic actions through which a person's mind is reflected are through his care of his body: cleanliness, concern for health, eating, and the like. We think of the anatomical body as our internal reality. A means through which one can examine society, culture and the human condition. But our bodies are hidden from us. What happens under our skin is mysterious, frightening, fascinating. In the distant past, the inner structure of the human body was a matter of speculation, fantasy, and little research, and there were very few attempts to present it in pictures. The development of anatomical research, together with the invention of printing and the subsequent flow of printing technologies, helped to inspire new and striking anatomy. Imaginary anatomy flourished, full of information but also strange, surreal, beautiful and ridiculous - exposes the external world as much as it exposes the inner world.

At the beginning of the modern era the boundary between art and science was undefined yet. Anatomy experts and their artistic partners used familiar ways of portraying them through religious and artistic landscape symbols. The artists tried to create precise illustrations, but also surprising, beautiful and entertaining.

Between 1680 and 1800, anatomy experts began to explore the imaginary elements of the scientific illustration. The reliability of anatomy, they claimed, was impaired by visual delusions, imaginary landscapes, and comic poses. When the ancient printing technologies became sophisticated, a style of brilliant and dreamy hyper-authenticity emerged, which showed, with great artistic talent, more sophisticated knowledge and an updated perception of the interior of the body.

In the 1930s, Fritz Kahn in Germany produced a series of books on the inner workings of the human body. He used metaphors taken from the industrial world: production lines, internal combustion engines, refineries, power generators, telephones, and so on. The body in Kahn's works was 'modern' and productive, a subject emphasized visually through innovative art. Although his books sold well, his Jewishness, and his preaching for public reforms, made him the target of Nazi attacks. He fled to America in 1940.

The anatomical presentations in recent years offer us traces of our inner selves. The artist / scientist / journalist Alexander Ciaras is inspired by the worldview that the anatomical body is a microcosm, a 'small world', and what is found in the external world is also found within man and is revealed through the science of anatomy. Ciaras uses body scanners and laser holograms to create images of the human body that combine an accurate description with an artistic touch.

In everyday life, we are surrounded from all sides by spectacular visual representations of our body organs, from the entire body, through individual organs, to microscopic cells. These perceptions are embedded in every move we make. It seems that the eye is not satisfied with these illustrations, and the brain asks them for more and more, without ever finding the way to satisfy what he wants.

The systemic approach, which has taken a great deal of control over all areas of scientific thought today, has led to anatomical and biological systems in general being compared to artificial systems used by man, as well as information systems. The action of the human body is defined as the action of different systems, and the systems created by man in all spheres of existence try to learn from the manner in which these systems work and enact them.

One of the central themes in art is 'nature landscapes'. Artistic freedom allows the artist to create imaginary landscapes on the canvas, which, after hanging on the walls, become an inseparable part of the world picture of the occupants of the house.

Classical architecture places emphasis on the 'human front' of the buildings. This was achieved through design, decorations and sculptures. The combination of human figures and textures on the façades of luxury houses and squares contributes to the urban landscape.

While the anatomical description is committed to scientific precision in describing the human body, the art of painting enjoys great freedom in this field. The creation of plastic art that combines people with landscape descriptions unites them. Descriptions of the landscape become the reflection of man, and vice versa. Many of the great painting artists anthropomorphized the landscapes that were the background to the characters that were the theme, and one example is the Mona Lisa background.

Before the Renaissance there were no landscape paintings, at least not as we understand them. If anything, landscape was just a background view of the human figures. It was gradually changing. When the trees, the mountains, the fields, and the oceans began to stand out, a strange phenomenon occurred: the anthropomorphic landscape. Human forms in fact merged with the landscape, as if nature is nothing without the human narrative. It was as if one could not appreciate an art that did not returned in reflection, in the literal sense of the word.

These paintings usually included a hidden face in the landscape, as if to indicate that the earth was the one that shaped them, and its meaning is only the use made of it. This was especially true for some 17th century artists in the Netherlands. They produced a large number of works depicting the silhouette of a bearded man appearing in profile over rocky mountains. The beginning of the trend can be traced to the image created by the scholar Kirscher. He said that his design was inspired by a story about the plan in ancient times to sculpt a huge figure of Alexander the Great on Mount Athos.

Impressionist painters who were considered unacceptable at the end of the 19th century, but whose works are sold at record prices at the beginning of the 21st century, emphasized the general impression that the figure and the landscape combined, at the expense of the accuracy of the description. In this style, it is much easier to combine the subject with the landscape in the background and to prominently portray the human essence, both physical and spiritual.

The painter Salvador Dali described with his brush surrealistic visions in which the human body crumbles against a desert landscape, thereby creating an authentic combination of anatomy and geography. The painting is a political protest against the war. Dali was able to create a shocking picture, which leaves a great impression on the viewer, because of the frame created by the body organs against the sky, a composition that is a call to action for the subconscious.

Post-modern artists deconstructed the scenes they described for the basic elements. They created a way to describe the living and the inanimate with molecular tools. The postmodern architecture has abandoned the pure functional style, with its straight lines and flat, transparent facades, typical of skyscrapers in city centers. Architects like Frank Ghery have returned to human integration in the landscape of buildings they have planned, by creating structural disorder, which is actually a fitting facade of the physical sensation in the spatial environment of the building, and simultaneously gives a sense of its goals.

Artists today use digital technologies to create images in the style of fantastic realism and science fiction which is widespread in comics and cinema, with works such as Metropolis, Blade Runner, The Spirit in the Shell, Star Wars and others, whose plots take place in geographically imaginative places. At the same time, the body of the human characters in them is usually hybrid, part of it natural and part artificial. The theme of these works is always how much the human attributes can be stretched through anthropomorphism.