I just read through a series of blogs generated by an article in the journal Neurosurgery, in which two neurosurgery researchers at Johns Hopkins University argue that an anatomically accurate image of the human brain is hidden in God’s neck in one of Michelangelo’s frescos. I was struck by how little the reports and blogs had to say about it, which makes some sense considering we are looking at a medical/scientific image in a painting from the 16th century, by an artist whose name identifies the work and the time more than the man. There’s something incongruent about all of it. What Michelangelo may have actually been thinking seems way out of our reach. But I wanted to read some interesting things about what it could mean none-the-less. I wanted to think about it with somebody. There was, of course, one art historian, quoted in many of the reports, who thought the whole thing was nonsense.
I’m often frustrated by how compartmentalized our thinking has become. The content of the various disciplines contained in the words Arts and Sciences has grown so vast, that accomplishment requires specialization. And then there’s religion. But all of these things are built from some one world by virtue of the fact that they are all human. Certainly specialization is an effective tool. It is the specialization of cells that makes our existence possible. But our experience is a consequence of the extent to which they can be coordinated. The brain is thought to have specialized areas but much of the character of a human life is made from how they’re shared – how, for example, visual functions are extended to thought functions, mental images and forms, language and even mathematics.
Michelangelo was one man doing several things and doing them extraordinarily well. He did have a rocky relationship with the Church. But he lived in a time when art, science and religion had not developed the clear boundaries that separate them today. Why would someone of his stature, in his 16th century world, hide an anatomical image in God’s neck?. Is it hidden because the Church disapproved of the dissection of cadavers being done by students of anatomy? And he put it there like a rebellious child? Or is it part of the story he’s telling in the paintings themselves? Does it have some symbolic meaning? The brain stem is fundamental to human experience and thought. What does it mean to have it in what Douglas Field’s article calls the voice-box of God? Could it be an expression of the fact that God and the flesh are related, or some material expression of the Christian idea of God within us, or of how we may hear God? ‘The flesh,’ after all is given a lot of attention in the Gospels.
Dr. Field’s article for the Huffington Post (also showing as a guest blog at Scientific American) was the only post I enjoyed.
I’ll end with this quote from it:
Perhaps the meaning in the Sistine Chapel is not of God giving intelligence to Adam, but rather that intelligence and observation — and the bodily organ that makes them possible –lead, without the necessity of Church, directly to God. The material is rich for speculation and the new findings will doubtlessly spark endless interpretation. We may never know the truth, but in Separation of Light from Darkness, Michelangelo’s masterpiece combines the worlds of art, religion, science, and faith in a provocative and awe inspiring work of art, which may also be a mirror.
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