Anatomy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Essay Example

Anatomy in the renaissance period was full of questions about how the body works and how it evolved. So, from the questions came answers. The answers came from delving deeper into the body and using renaissance artists to draw and or sculpt the human body in more careful detail. From doing these things, people understood what the body looked like and how it worked, but there was one small problem. The church.

Anatomy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were drastically varying in knowledge. In the Middle Ages, the church had majority of the power over the people. Because of this, people believed that the church knew everything about how they should live, including how they should treat illness. But the church’s teachings weren’t as accurate as they needed to be. Source 1 shows an anatomical drawing depicting what they thought the human body was perceived as in the Middle Ages. As you can see, it has little resemblance of what the body actually looks like. The limbs may be in the correct placement, but it was lacking the detail in needed. After the Black Plauge swept through Europe, people began questioning the churches knowledge. In the renaissance period, people, like Leonardo Di Vinci, started doing things his own way. Leonardo started studying the human body in more detail and drew diagrams of limbs, bones, silhouettes and more, and started sharing it with the world. Source 2, which is a drawing done by Leonardo Di Vinci in the renaissance. As shown, the detail in this piece is in much greater detail then source 1. This artwork is a better depiction of what the adult human body looks like. Therefore, the difference between anatomy in the Middle Ages compared to the Renaissance period is the fact that they had access to things like dissections and more skilled artists, they were able to draw/construct the human body in a more accurate detail. 

Anatomy in the renaissance period was full of questions about how they could treat humans better when overcome by illness and/or injuries. because of better access to resources such as disections where they could drive deeper into the body. After the black plauge, people wanted to find out more about how this small thing caused such a bad reaction to the human body and how they couldn't find a cure for it. So, people like Leonardo Di Vinci, decided to get a better understanding about how the body works/looks. But the only problem was the fact that the Church had banned human disections as in those days, if you wanted to go to heaven/resurrect, your body would need to be whole. Source 3 shows a human dissection being shown as an oil painting, done by Willem Van Da Meer. This depicts 20 Men standing around an open corpse that Willem stole from a grave site. This was a common practice in the renaissance as disections were banned by the church. People wished deeply to gain a deeper understanding about the human body that they went to the effort of breaking into Graves and steal corpses. Even though the Church banned it, they went against their wishes. Thus, even though the church banned, the people went their own way to understand the human body further so that they were prepared to treat illness or injury better than ever before.