Leonardo's Foot

by Carol Ann Rinzler

  Before Eden, shame was not unknown, but as you might expect in a warm environment where people ran about scantily clad, shame about one’s body was uncommon. It was only after Eve that the naked human body became a sign of lost innocence, to be covered with “garments of skin” (Genesis 3:17) or even with something as minimal as an artistic fig leaf. Ditto for the naked human foot. Being the body part closest to the ground, it was both good (your connection to the earth that provides sustenance) and evil (your connection to the cursed earth), and thus a useful stand-in for body parts and functions considered unmentionable in polite society.

  Neuroscience and the PET scan have made it possible to show how the areas of our brain light up when we perform specific intellectual tasks such as solving math problems (women appear to use both sides of the brain; men, only one) or experience highly emotional moments such as thinking about a loved one, but in language and mythology, we still attribute character traits to particular body organs, especially the heart. We may scoff at those ancients who ate the heart of a conquered enemy to acquire his courage, but we are equally if less bloodily entranced: We say that a successful athlete has heart, and every St. Valentine’s day we glorify the heart as the place where love lives.

  People of the Body (1992) is a collection of essays subtitled, Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective. In the essay, “Images of God’s Feet,” New York University professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies Elliot Wolfson describes the use of feet as biblical symbols for the male genitalia, explaining that repeated references to putting on and taking off sandals, bathing one’s feet, and uncovering the feet are implicit references to sexual intercourse as in the Book of Ruth 3:4-6 when Naomi, instructs her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth to visit a sleeping Boaz: “… when he lieth down, though shalt mark the place where he shall lie, and thou shalt go in, and uncover his feet, and lay thee down.” There is also the ancient Jewish ceremony of Haliztah (“taking off”) described in Deuteronomy 25:7-10. The ceremony relieves the brother of a man who has died childless of his obligation to marry the widow and releases the widow to marry someone else. The two come before the rabbinical court (beth din) where she says he refuses to marry her, he confirms it, she removes his right shoe, throws it down, spits on the ground in front of him, and everyone in the room knows exactly what that means because they know that, like uncovering the feet, putting a foot into a shoe is shorthand for sexual intercourse and her removing his shoe says this did not/will not happen.

  Just as uncovering the feet is a euphemism for sexual intercourse, covering the feet is a euphemism for urination, as in Judges 3:24 when servants, knocking on Ehud’s locked bedroom door, tell each other that, “Surely he is covering his feet in the cabinet of the cool chamber.” And for anyone who missed the meaning, the evolution of the biblical language from classic to modern makes it perfectly clear. The phrase “Saul went in to cover his feet” (First Samuel 24:4) in the original Old Testament and the King James Bible is “Saul went in to relieve himself ” in the New International Version (NIV).

  Using feet as symbols for genitalia and bodily functions actually makes metaphorical sense. Our bipedalism not only facilitated our sexual display, but also allowed us to engage in sex standing up, face to face, a position that requires serious athletic ability and is so fraught with conflicting emotions that authors such as Mario Puzo in The Godfather and filmmakers such as Bernardo Bertolucci in Last Tango in Paris have embraced it as a visual image for one or both of the extreme poles of sexual encounter—urgent passion and uncontrollable violence.

  And, yes, you can certainly carry this kind of analysis too far.

  It is, unlikely, for example, that feet are metaphors for female genitals. Some see that possibility in passages such as Deuteronomy 28:57 when during childbirth, the child “cometh out from between her feet” or Ezekiel 16:25, a long denunciation of Jerusalem, the wayward Bride of God: “Thou hast built thy lofty place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty an abomination and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy harlotries.” But the first seems a simple description of one position during labor and the second less a substitute for lady parts than a plain accusation of wifely betrayal: “I gave you everything you asked for and you still chose to go clubbing and flirt with other men instead of paying attention to me.” The choice of language in succeeding versions of Ezekiel appears to prove this true. In the Jewish Publication Society of America Old Testament (1952), there are nine “harlots” and seven “harlotry/harlotries.” In the King James (1611), the “harlots” are still there, but the ‘”harlotry/harlotries” have become the less poetic “fornication” and “whoredom.” By the time the NIV was first issued in 1971, there are no harlots and no harlotry. What you see is what you get: “Prostitution.”

  Uncovering what’s inside

  In The Book of Filial Piety, Confucius (551 to 479 BCE) says that the human body is precious because it is a gift from one’s parents: “Our bodies, to every hair and bit of skin, are received by us from our parents, and we must not presume to injure or wound them.”

  Others in the ancient world—which for the purposes of this chapter means the Mediterranean cultures in the centuries before the fall of the Roman Empire—believed that the body was a receptacle for the spirit of its god(s). This notion certainly predates monotheism, but the actual words are perhaps written most definitively in First Corinthians 6:19-20: “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?”

  Add to this a belief in life after death, and you can see that keeping the dead body intact becomes really important in some circles. Chopping off parts of the losers’ bodies after battle was a fairly universal custom, but the corpses of one’s own tribe, civilians and soldiers alike, were treated with respect. As University of Manchester’s Jacqueline Finch explained in her description of the Egyptian artificial toes, one of which was found on a mummy, Egyptian “embalmers made every attempt to reinstate the completeness of the physical body before burial. The body could be moulded in plaster, packed with mud, sand, linen, butter, or soda. Even sawdust was stuffed between the skin and muscle to reform the contours, and false eyes, noses, and often genitals were added. Where limbs were missing generally poor imitations were added, of linen, reed, mud, and resin. Spells inscribed on the walls of ancient Egyptian royal tombs (known as the Pyramid Texts, c. 2375 BCE), spells decorating the inside of coffins (the Coffin Texts, c. 2055 BCE), and mortuary texts written on papyrus (the Book of the Dead, c. 1550 BCE) all refer to the importance of ‘reassembling’ and ‘reuniting’ the body to enable ‘revitalisation’ to take place in the Afterlife. This was seen as a prerequisite to the mystical reanimation expected in the next world.”

  The Jews forbade cremation, insisting that a body must be buried whole. Christians thought resurrection might be impossible if parts were missing. Even today, in some cultures some people still save “missing” tissues such as an excised appendix or gallstone or a bloodied cloth in special containers for eventual burial with the rest of the body. Although Islam and Judaism remain formally opposed to autopsy, organ donation is now most commonly accepted by all religions as an act of human kindness in keeping with their teachings so long as it does not hasten the death of the donor—a touchy question for those who believe that death arrives not when the brain ceases its activity, but when the heart stops beating.

  Human dissection has always been—pun intended—an even more dicey subject, but here it leads by twisty path from the visible feet of the Mediterranean gods to the invisible feet of the God of the Bible and then to the Christian God of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel whose feet are plainly visible, but whose brain is hidden in plain sight.

  In medicine and art, how we see our bodies depends to a large extent on how clearly we see our bodies, including the feet on which we stand. What we once imagined to be hidden under the skin, based on animal dissection or pure fantasy, could be displaced only when we began to cut into the huma
n body itself, and doing that required us to reconcile medical necessity with our spiritual and intellectual biases, a sometimes uncomfortable process.

  As Sushruta, the seventh or sixth century BCE Indian surgeon, wrote in the Sushruta Samhita (Sushruta’s Summary): “Any one, who wishes to acquire a thorough knowledge of anatomy, must prepare a dead body and carefully observe and examine all its parts.” Forbidden by his Hindu faith to cut into the body with a knife, Sushruta came up with an acceptable alternative, submerging a corpse in water for a week or more to soften and decompose the tissues which soon fell away to reveal the structures underneath.

  The first medical dissection of a human body, complete with scalpel, appears to have been performed in the late sixth century BCE at the medical school in Croton, a city-state in Magna Graecia (Latin for Great Greece) at the bottom of the Italian “boot” where the people were known as Italians to the Greeks and Greeks to the Romans. Croton seems to have been far enough off the beaten philosophical path to permit a physiologist named Alcmaeon to slice away in peace, in the process identifying the optic nerve, differentiating veins from arteries, and naming the brain as the center of the intellect. After that, for centuries the internal anatomy of the human body remained, to steal a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, a “known unknown,” as the acceptance of human dissection swung back and forth like a pendulum depending on where you lived and who was in charge. Aristotle is said to have performed two dissections in secret, but his Parts of Animals, written around 350 BCE, is based strictly on species other than us. Fifty years later, Ptolemy I (c. 360–c. 282 BCE)— former Greek general; Alexander’s biographer; self-appointed Egyptian King; and founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which produced fifteen kings named Ptolemy who ruled Egypt for more than 300 years—encouraged two Greek physicians, Herophilus (335–280 BCE) and Erasistratus (304–250 BCE), to dissect human cadavers, and sometimes vivisect living human beings, at the school of anatomy they founded in Alexandria.

  Much later, Claudius Galen (c. 129–c. 216), yet another Greek physician who went to practice in Rome, eventually rising to become court physician to the emperor, was rumored to have performed human dissections in secret. But Galen’s anatomical drawings were based strictly on animal dissections, so they were often flawed. For example, his pictures of the attachment of the muscles in the upper back to the neck and head are simply wrong. As Raymond Dart knew when he first saw the Taung Child, a body that holds its head straight up (human), requires an arrangement of the supporting tissues different from a body whose head leans forward (ape and Neanderthal), or sits on a horizontal line with the spine (dog, cats, and other four footed creatures). Denied human dissection, Galen never saw the difference.

  Christians formalized their opposition to dissection at the Council of Tours in 1163, but Renaissance artists—not Renaissance physicians—resurrected the study of anatomy. Art, not medicine, led the way to our true understanding of our anatomy, and art, not medicine, truly drew the picture of our foot, including the foot of God the Bible had ignored.

  Although his anatomical drawings were not published until after his death, Leonardo ignored the Church and dissected as many as 30 human corpses. Clearly, Michelangelo also performed dissections. Nobody knows exactly how many, but evidently the bodies were mostly those provided by the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Florence in exchange for a wooden cross for the sacristy of the Church of Santa Maria del Santo Spirito, suggesting that while the religion decried dissection, many in the Church itself might not.

  Of course, just as Galen’s pictures of human anatomy had been flawed by his being limited to animal dissection, some of Da Vinci’s and Michelangelo’s representations of internal female anatomy were wrong because there just weren’t enough female corpses available to make it possible for them to get the details right. That small issue aside, the artists’ paintings, drawings, and sculpture, including the Vitruvian Man, are clear proof of how we benefited from their apostasy.

  Dissection wasn’t the only thumb they stuck in the Church’s eye.

  In Egypt, the gods were at least partially clothed. In Greece, male deities were often shown naked, but goddesses—except for Aphrodite—were clothed, although their garments left little to the imagination. The Romans showed both male and female deities unclothed; most famously Diana (the Roman name for Artemis) had one breast bared in imitation of Amazon warriors said to slice away one breast in order to draw the bow smoothly across the chest.

  For Greek and Roman gods, “nude” didn’t simply mean without clothes: it meant without imperfection like the Vitruvian Man. Not until the post-Classical Hellenistic period did Roman artists sometimes add wrinkles and other realistic signs of age to their human portraits such as The Old Market Woman, who stands (or stoops) forever ancient, one breast bare, in a first floor gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

  When the Reformation arrived on a wave of real and imagined scandal among the Catholic hierarchy, naked bodies in Church art became a target, with the Sistine panels squarely in the bull’s eye. In 1563, the Council of Trent attempted to bat away the Protestant charges of corruption by countering with new-found Catholic prudery, decreeing that henceforth “[e]very superstition shall be removed [from art, particularly Church art] … all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust … there be nothing seen that is disorderly, or that is unbecomingly or confusedly arranged, nothing that is profane, nothing indecorous, seeing that holiness becometh the house of God.”

  Nobody wanted to tangle with a living Michelangelo, who was known to retaliate by painting an adversary’s face onto the body of a devilish creature. But once he was safely dead and buried, Giovanni Pietro Caraffa (Pope Paul IV), who also authorized the publication of the infamous list of banned books known as “Index Librorum Prohibitorum,” set up what has come to be known as the “Fig Leaf Campaign” due to the Vatican’s hiring an artist to cover the Sistine genitalia with fig leaves that remained in place until late in the twentieth century when the entire work was cleaned and restored.

  As for dissection, there were still a few bumps on the road to serious study.

  In 1543, thirty-one years after Michelangelo climbed down from his scaffold, Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) published his anatomical masterpiece, De Corporis Humani Fabrica (The Structure of the Human Body). Twenty-one years after that, the Inquisition, which had obviously been busy with other things, sentenced him to death for ignoring Church dicta. But Vesalius, court physician to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth and the Spanish King Philip the Second, had friends in high places. The death sentence was lifted, and he was sent off on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem instead. Alas, that turned out to be his own appointment in Samarra. He died when the ship on which he was returning home sank off the coast of Greece in October 1564, one year before Britain’s Protestant Queen Elizabeth I gave London’s Royal College of Physicians the right to begin dissecting human cadavers.

  Elizabeth’s gift to medical anatomists was limited to the corpses of four criminals a year who had been hanged in London or within 16 miles of the city. In 1752, the British expanded the rule with what is commonly known as The Murder Act, a law legalizing medical schools’ dissection of any executed murderer for the study of human anatomy. The practice had already made its way to the American Colonies, where, as Temple University/Beasley School of Law professor Harwell Wells notes, the state of Massachusetts had ruled in 1784 that there were two ways to dispose of the corpse of a person killed while dueling. You could bury it with a stake driven through the body, or you could hand it over to the anatomist for dissection, probably at the recently opened school of medicine at Harvard. New York passed a similar law, minus the stake-through-the-body rule, in 1789; one year later federal judges were given the right to add post-mortem dissection to a criminal death sentence.

  Two hundred and one years later, in 1990, with dissection long since an est
ablished part of every physician’s training, a gynecologist in Anderson, Indiana, named Frank Lynn Meshberger opened a book about Michelangelo to the page showing the panel in the Sistine Chapel known as The Creation of Adam and blinked, maybe more than once you might imagine. What he saw there, hidden in plain sight around the head of God, was something no one else had seen in the nearly 500 years since Michelangelo painted the chapel ceiling: A perfect, anatomically correct image of the human brain, brainstem, and spinal cord with God’s hand reaching through the prefrontal cortex, the highly developed part of the brain just under the forehead where thought lives. “People have said that what is being passed from God to man in the painting is the spark of life,” Meshberger told The New York Times during an interview the following October on the day an article he wrote about the painting appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “But Adam is already alive. I think what God is giving to Adam here is intellect.”

  This would certainly fit right in with Michelangelo’s views of an artistic inspiration as recorded in one of his own sonnets, which Meshberger included in his article:

  After the divine part has well conceived

  Man’s face and gesture, soon both mind and hand,

  With a cheap model, first, at their command,

  Give life to stone, but this is not achieved

  By skill. In painting, too, this is perceived:

  Only after the intellect has planned

  The best and highest, can the ready hand

  Take up the brush and try all things received.

  Others—art experts as well as physicians—were skeptical. You could hardly blame them. What makes the arts so interesting is that enjoying them is an intensely personal experience. Everyone agrees that the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Symphony in C Minor) are three short gs and one long e: Dah-dah-dah-daaaaah. But how long? How short? What you hear depends not only on how fast or slow, loud or soft, the orchestra plays, but also on the condition of your ears, young or old, sensitive or not, clean or blocked by an allergy or head cold. Similarly, every painting is a Rorschach of its own, interpreted by what you feel and think as well as what you see.