I spend a fair amount of time in the area shared between art and science. I like the combination. Apparently Michaelagelo and others in his time did too.
Renaissance artists were medical illustrators in their own right. Along with cutting the trees down to make their canvases, grinding their own pigments and who knows what else, they also dissected cadavers and drew what they saw for practice. Michaelangelo’s David is thought to be very accurate anatomically for this reason, as an example.
But not all Michaelangelo’s works portray such accuracy. A neurosurgeon and a modern day medical illustrator from Johns Hopkins Medical School recently found that in a figure of God in a fresco called “Dividing Light from Darkenss” the neck contains a form that looks much like the brainstem (from an obsure angle). And there’s two line like shapes painted down the front of the figure, which looks a lot like the spinal cord.
In reality, the brainstem is located at the back of the brain (approximately the center of the head, not the neck). It controls many basic functions such as sleep and wakefulness, movement coordination and much more. The spinal cord runs down the center of the of the spinal column. They are both a part of the central nervous system.
