Before he became a famous artist, he was dissecting corpses from a church graveyard. Ostensibly he was doing this to further his studies in human anatomy which of course was necessary to his artistic development.
In my mind’s eye I can see the great Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni looking at his blocks of marble, into his sketchbooks and at his paint brushes and saying to them, ” Talk to me. “
I can also see him asking the same question to the corpses he dissected.
And in turn the marble, the paints, the sketchbook and the corpses must have said, ” Have I got a story for you ” and he listened.
In 1990 Frank Lynn Meshberger, M.D. described what millions had overlooked for centuries — an anatomically accurate image of the human brain was portrayed behind God.
On close examination, borders in the painting correlate with sulci in the inner and outer surface of the brain, the brain stem, the basilar artery, the pituitary gland and the optic chiasm. God’s hand does not touch Adam, yet Adam is already alive as if the spark of life is being transmitted across a synaptic cleft. Below the right arm of God is a sad angel in an area of the brain that is sometimes activated on PET scans when someone experiences a sad thought. God is superimposed over the limbic system, the emotional center of the brain and possibly the anatomical counterpart of the human soul. God’s right arm extends to the prefrontal cortex, the most creative and most uniquely human region of the brain.
Detail From: The Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel, 1536-1541 (Fresco), by Michelangelo
