Depictions of Anatomy

You can’t get around depictions of Anatomy – as soon as you draw anything you have depicted anatomy and unless you are adopt a painting style that is some what abstract, you open yourself up to claims that your depiction isn’t accurate.

A recent literature review uncovered several publications where modern anatomists were pointing out the errors of famous artists – a future blog post maybe.

Last week I was out for dinner at the Edinburgh restaurant 21212. It had been on our list of restaurants to visit for some time. The food was fantastic, and the presentation was outstanding.

Each table had a small figure on it. The table beside ours had this little model of a dragon.

I had spent some of the previous week finishing an article for the British Fantasy Society about winged mythical beasts and the problems they present for anatomy.

You can see that this dragon has wings and shoulders which poses questions as to how either limb works without effecting the other. There is always something around to make start a conversation on anatomy – this is a good one as most people don’t fully understand the relationship between their arm and their shoulder blade and when you add breathing in to that equation they rarely appreciate the fact that they are all connected.

Upstairs, in the private dining room, there is an amazing picture

This is a small part of the painting by Caravaggio called the 7 acts of mercy. The seven acts are actually all depicted in the lower part of the painting and this section just shows two angels looking down on a scene that we can no longer see.

What we can see though are pairs of wings coming out of the back of the angels. How would that work? An excellent backdrop for a science talk about anatomy of flight – somehow I can’t see the science fair budget running to a private dining experience.