This triptych also calls attention to the gruesome and unsanitary medical practices that were common of the times: “Such images reflect the practice of hanging the shrivelled, amputated limbs of plague victims above the entrance portals of Antonite monasteries,” (181). This practice of hanging patients’ severed limbs identified monasteries as places of healing and were a sign of comfort for those suffering from St. Anthony’s fire. The hanging of amputated limbs was a historical monastic practice that eventually became a convention for depicting St. Anthony, as the namesake of the disease that caused people to lose their limbs, as well as the patron saint for those that suffered from ergotism.

The St. Anthony triptych is rife with images from Bosch’s fecund imagination. Many of the characters represented in the painting resemble demons much like the ones that persecuted St. Anthony, and surely representative of the hallucinations that victims of St. Anthony’s fire suffered through. Thus St. Anthony is a sympathetic figure for these victims; the author identifies Saint Anthony as “a model whom disease victims were instructed to emulate,” (184). St. Anthony suffered a lifetime of unspeakable horrors and battled against hellish demons; sufferers of ergotism likewise suffered unimaginably and likely battled visions of similar demons. It is possible that images such as this provided comfort for patients that were in the throws of ergotism, since it proved that the vivid hallucinations they suffered existed outside of their own minds.

Bosch presents himself as another artist with an interest in the field of science during the Renaissance. Even if Bosch did not practice alchemy on his own, he probably had knowledge of the practice of pharmacology due to the prevalence of St. Anthony’s fire and the visibility of Antonine monks that helped treat this illness. His understanding of alchemy is apparent in the details of his Saint Anthony triptych, with his inclusion of common instruments that were used by alchemists. The author notes that the “distillation apparatus is as much an attribute of the saint as are his bell, fire, book and staff,” (198). Bosch also includes representations of folk treatments of St. Anthony’s fire, such as mandrake and cold fish, among the characters in this triptych. However these personified treatments appear almost monstrous; in fact, often times medicines from things such as mandrake could worsen the hallucinations that were caused by ergotism, making these treatments a double-edged sword in many cases.

Leonardo’s passage on the Lips is very interesting because in this passage he uses practical examples to get across ideas he has discovered about anatomy. The point that he makes about the appearance of lips when speaking quietly differing from the appearance of lips when speaking loudly is a very easily understandable hypothesis, and it is also easy to observe in real life. The fact that Leonardo relates something as complex as the anatomical structure of the muscles of the lips to something very accessible is important because it shows that he is writing these notebooks in order for the reader to understand them, and this is another example of him acting as a sort of professor of anatomy for the audience of his notes.

This passage on human movement (p 149) reminds me of the Raphael sketch of a cadaver hung by cords that is discussed in the Laurenza reading (p 17). We can see through both artists’ studies that they possessed a great deal of interest in the dynamics of the human body. In this passage, Leonardo takes a mathematical approach in discussing how a person shifts their weight from one leg to another when travelling up stairs. He describes in detail the physics of the different forces on a body in motion, as well as the anatomical features that cause or are caused by that motion. By contrast, Raphael studies the movement of the body through the lens of an artist. He studied corpses to see the dynamics of how the human body falls, or rests, and which parts of the body are strained or used in various states; he used these findings to inform his paintings of people. For example, Raphael’s sketches of a corpse suspended by cords was probably a study that was used to paint the crucifiction. In summary, I find it very interesting the way that two artists used very different means to achieve the same ends, in terms of studying corpses in order to better depict the human figure.

On p.144 Leonardo makes an interesting point regarding the practice and study of human anatomy. Earlier in his notebooks, he emphasizes his own philosophy that all knowledge should be acquired through observation and experience. However in this passage on p. 144, Leonardo seems to contradict this by encouraging his reader not to watch the dissection of a human corpse for the purpose of studying anatomy, but rather to study Leonardo’s anatomical sketches. While it is understandable why Leonardo’s sketches might be more useful in distilling the appearance of a cadaver into a more clearly readable and identifiable format, it is that he does not suggest the use of his sketches as supplemental information to consult in dissections. He goes on to praise his own skill while also warning others at trying their hands because of the difficulties involved with dissections.

Both naturalism and empiricism are techniques with which the artist can most closely imitate a form. However the distinction that the author makes here is that naturalistic imagery is only that which appears to take place at a moment in time because humans are only capable of observing nature as a series of moments. On the contrary, the author states that “The greater the area of detailed investigation, the less the image would correspond to ordinary experience,” (p 188). Empiricism describes something that has been deeply observed over a period of time, so even if an artist copies every detail of an object with perfect accuracy, their painting is not naturalistic because the object they are observing is now separate from nature.

Here the author notes that “...Naturalism is not deeply affected by the style changes of high culture,” (p 187). I think this is a very important statement that the author has made because it confirms that the nature of how art was being produced during the Renaissance is in its essence scientific. At the time, scientists formed conjectures and theories about the nature of the universe based on what they observed; as long as these observations were proven mathematically, a scientist’s theory could stand as truth. While various scientists might have had different “styles” of interpreting the world as they observed it, the only true interpretations were those that could be proven. The same also applies for Renaissance artists: stylistic variation allows artists to depict images differently based on their own interpretations, however only those paintings executed with a loyalty to the form as it appears in nature could be considered naturalistic. On the other hand conventional imagery, which can vary according to style in the same way as naturalism, is in fact inaccurate because it gives no attention to the forms as they objectively appear in nature.