Bartolomeo Torre’s “Muscles and Bones of the Leg” peels back the skin. The muscles and tendons exposed are smooth and in paper’s beige color instead of a sinewy red. They wrap around each other like alien organisms, coming together to make a leg.
Torre’s drawing is part of the Benton Museum’s exhibition “500 Years of Italian Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum.” It is currently on view as one of several other drawings under the section “Studying the Body.”
The leg form in this drawing looks like a bundle of lamb chops or some other inhuman thing; recognizing it as a leg didn’t come intuitively to me. Seeing it all laid out, all the muscles and bones and nerves, was unsettling. Towards the front, Torre has included pieces of skin and toenails, which reminded me that the foot was human.
Although many Renaissance artists became anatomists, Torre was particularly obsessed. According to Giorgio Vasari, Torre’s contemporary, the artist was so single-mindedly occupied with anatomy that he kept “so many limbs and pieces of men under his bed, and all over his rooms, that they poisoned the whole house.” His account might be exaggerated, but it is true that Torre conducted independent anatomical research and held private dissections of human corpses.
I can’t help seeing “Muscles and Bones of the Leg” as an unintentional self-portrait. This is what a human leg looks like, so this is what your leg looked like, Torre. I imagined him standing over the dissection table, scalpel in hand, looking down through the layers of muscle and nerves; he must also have seen it as his own leg that he was dissecting. He must also have seen through his own skin.
“The leg form in this drawing looks like a bundle of lamb chops or some other inhuman thing; recognizing it as a leg didn’t come intuitively to me.”
All drawings try to understand how something exists in physical space. Specifically, anatomical drawings aim to understand how the body exists. Torre, in drawing the leg, was trying to understand the limb. Drawing something also means choosing how to best communicate that thing, deciding what to include and not include in the image in order to qualify the bit of pencil on paper as a leg. So, drawing a leg also means choosing what makes a leg a leg.
Drawing a leg to understand it necessarily means drawing a leg to understand your own body. Anatomical drawing becomes a mode of self-investigation. What does it mean to have a leg, to have a body? I think that’s why this drawing makes me uneasy — not because of the more obvious gore, but because it annihilates every individual person into the same prescribed body.
A few years ago, I went through a phase of drawing my own face repeatedly, sitting on the ground in front of my full-length mirror at night. It was a self-investigation kind of thing; the self-portrait sessions increased in frequency around my birthday, prime time for existential dread and self-awareness.
In “Muscles and Bones of the Leg,” there is no face. Nothing individualizes the person to whom this leg belongs — there is no facial expression to attach a soul or mind or anything else to. I am uneasy thinking that under the skin, my leg is the same leg as this anonymous corpse.
The visibility of muscle and bones beneath skin — and the skeletal leg next to the living leg — feel like strange reminders of how the body begins and ends. Although presumably unintentional, Torre’s work has a to-dust-you-shall-return kind of effect.
Torre is largely unknown today, having died at age 25 and with few surviving works, all of which relate to anatomical study. So really, in the end, his body was like the bodies he studied. His leg was like every other leg.
Art columnist Nadia Hsu PO ’27 is from Austin, Texas. She is chalant.
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