It has been hiding in plain sight for the past 500 years,and now two Johns Hopkins professors believe they have found it: a rare Michelangelo anatomical drawing in a panel high on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was a conscientious student of human anatomy and enthusiastically dissected corpses throughout his life,but few of his anatomical drawings survive. This one,a depiction of the human brain and brain stem,appears to be drawn on the neck of God,but not all art historians can see it there. This is not the first picture of a human organ someone has found in Michelangelos Sistine frescoes. In 1990,in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association,a physician described what he saw as a rendering of the human brain in the Creation of Adam,the panel showing God touching Adams finger. And one physician published an article in a medical journal in 2000 suggesting that Michelangelo had included a drawing of a kidney in another ceiling panel. The author was,perhaps not coincidentally,a kidney specialist. The latest find,described in a study in the May issue of the journal Neurosurgery,appears directly above the altar in The Separation of Light From Darkness, another panel from the series of nine depicting scenes from the Book of Genesis. God,clothed in flowing red robes,is viewed from below and foreshortened,and seems to be rising into the sky. His arms are raised above his head,and he faces up and to his right,exposing his neck and the underside of a short beard. It is here that the studys authors,the medical illustrator Ian Suk and Dr Rafael J. Tamargo,a neurosurgeon,believe that Michelangelo concealed a drawing of the underside of the brain and the brain stem,with parts of the temporal lobe,the medulla,the pons and other structures clearly drawn. To Dr Tamargos eye,Gods neck in the fresco is distinctly different from those of other figures depicted in more or less the same posture. Usually,the neck looks smooth,but in The Separation of Light From Darkness there are lines and shapes quite different from the normal external anatomy of the neck,irregularities that he believes cannot be accidental. The anatomy of the neck is very,very unusual, he said,and if it were not intentionally drawn that way,you would have to postulate that Michelangelo had a very bad day,which is very unlikely because he was very meticulous. Is it really there,or are the authors seeing patterns where there are none? The interpretation,Dr Tamargo said,is certainly subjective artists dont accompany their work with a description of what theyre putting in there. But I think that as with any finding,its either validated or rejected by what others think.
