Murderers , Mathematicians ∗

This article outlines the history of our visualization of the interior of the human body. It throws some light on the emotional context and the underlying idea of man. In order of appearance on the historical stage, the leading characters are: painters, murderers (more precisely: executed persons including thieves driven merely by need, women with illegitimate children, etc.), and mathematicians as well as computer scientists (the latter subsumed under mathematicians). In the Christian cultural sphere, until the renaissance, a glance into the interior of the human body was accompanied with grave risk. Though the instruction “Thou shalt not make thee any graven image” 2 applied only to any representation of God, the medieval church had early on extended this ban to angels and other beings of everyday life. To be on the safe side, artists of those days would start out with allegoric representations of the interior of deceased saints, for instance under the legitimation of Vanitas mundi. In the Islamic cultural sphere, at least in its major part, any representation even of the exterior of ‘beings that have been created by God’ (Quran) was forbidden – which, to Arabic art, only left open the rich magic worlds of geometric and floral designs that we nowadays still admire in tiles, carpets, and tapestries. Ever since the renaissance, painters with anatomical interest led the defiance of the explicit interdiction of the nearly almighty Church, sneaked at night to the places of execution and dissected the corpses of executed persons – without their premortal assent, of course. Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519),