Ginger Hooper //
To know oneself. That’s what we’re all trying to do, right—get to know ourselves, a little every day? But what exactly is important to know, and how do we learn it?
There’s a Sufi saying: “Whoever knows himself knows his lord.”[1] The Persian physician and scholar Mansur Ibn Ilyas apparently quotes this maxim as the rationale behind his famous 14th century medical atlas. For Mansur, anatomical text and illustration were a means of gaining knowledge about the body and self—which was in turn an insight into the design and nature of God Himself.
Tashrīḥ-i badan-i insān, or Mansur’s Anatomy, is known for being the first anatomical atlas with color illustrations, and copies of it were distributed throughout the Persian world for centuries.
It begins with an introduction on Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Al-Razi, Avicenna and Islamic Prophetic tradition.[2] The book is then divided based on bodily system, each of the six chapters accompanied by a full-body illustration—an unsexed squatting figure surrounded and overlaid with calligraphic text.
The muscular, venous, arterial, and pregnant figures are viewed straight-on, from the front, but the skeletal and nervous figures are viewed from behind, with their palms facing the viewer and their heads hyperextended so the face is pointed upwards. Historians have hypothesized that this position is indicative of how a body would be spread out on a dissection table, laying on its stomach.[3] But why were only the skeletal and nervous figures depicted in this manner?
Scholars have noted similarities between Mansur’s illustrations and earlier European ones which also feature the characteristic squatting position and, sometimes, the backwards orientation.[4] This suggests exchange between the Latin and Persian traditions, though the exact medium is unknown.
More than their predecessors, Mansur’s illustrations have been described as “highly schematic” and diagrammatic.[5] The precise number and location of anatomical parts change from copy to copy, perhaps reflecting a lack of preoccupation for anatomical exactitude, and instead an appreciation for the figures as conceptual tools or schema meant to aid in developing an understanding of the body in a more abstract sense.
The muscular figure, for example, has hardly any specific muscles marked—instead, the largely blank body is chock-full of text, serving as a vehicle for delivering knowledge.
All the images are absent of any clothing, hair, or other markers of gender or social class. The ‘self’ seems to be absent here, the illustrations perhaps serving as a blank canvas for the viewer to imprint their own self onto.
Additionally, the figures sometimes depict “impossible views,” displaying multiple parts simultaneously that are not actually possible to see at once.[6]
Mansur appears to have intended a bodily image that was conceptual, general, and educational; schematic images were a fitting tool to educate others on physical knowledge, in order to bring them closer to a spiritual knowledge of self and God. Mansur coopted texts and images from Arabic, Greek, and Latin traditions in order to create a hybrid, adaptable body—an entity to know and to cherish.
Bibliography
Alghamdi, Malak, Janine Ziermann, and Rui Diogo. “An Untold Story: The Important Contributions of Muslim Scholars for the Understanding of Human Anatomy.” The Anatomical Record 300, no.6 (2017): 986-1008.
Bashir, Shahzad. Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam. Columbia University Press, 2011.
Contadini, Anna. Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Savage-Smith, Emilie. “Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine – Anatomy and Physiology – MS P 19,” U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Published January 15, 2004; last modified December 13, 2013. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/p19.html.
[1] Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (Columbia University Press, 2011), 30.
[2] Malak Alghamdi, Janine Ziermann, and Rui Diogo, “An Untold Story: The Important Contributions of Muslim Scholars for the Understanding of Human Anatomy,” The Anatomical Record 300, no.6 (2017): 986-1008.
[3] Emilie Savage-Smith, “Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine – Anatomy and Physiology – MS P 19,” U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Published January 15, 2004; last modified December 13, 2013.
[4] Anna Contadini, Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 156-157.
[5] Anna Contadini, Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 158.
[6] Anna Contadini, Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 158.
