Most societies have rules, laws or customs for the treatment of
dead bodies. Burial or cremation rites assure the dying that their
body will be respectfully disposed of and that they will 'rest in
peace'. However, some people wish to dissect the bodies of the dead
for academic or professional interest, as for example anatomists,
and their wish has often been regarded as in conflict with the
desire for peaceful repose. Anatomists have therefore conducted
their studies clandestinely: stealing cadavers from graveyards or
from the gallows, conducting their dissections in locked rooms by
night, and disposing of the remains in secrecy.
Such a scene is shown in this etching, based on a rapidly
executed Italian drawing now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
When in the drawings collection of the painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence
(1769-1820), it was considered to be by Michelangelo. The man on
the right might be Michelangelo, though he is no longer thought to
be the artist of this drawing. Instead, it might be drawn by
Polidoro Caldara (Polidoro da Caravaggio, who lived
c.1495-c.1543).
It shows two artists with measuring instruments studying the
proportions of a half-dissected body. Working by night, they have
stuck a big candle into the chest of the cadaver. The rapid drawing
technique gives the feeling that they must get their ghoulish work
done quickly before the watchman discovers them. The absurdity of
the situation, in which society approved of students understanding
anatomy but did not allow them to study it, was recognized from the
17th century onwards: official licenses, and subsequently laws, and
(in Great Britain) regulation by the Home Office, placed anatomical
dissection on a legal footing.