An Anatomy Lesson

In 1568 Giorgio Vasari published the second edition of his Lives of the artists, and this time each biography opened with a woodcut portrait. Painters suddenly had a shared set of faces for masters, some of them long dead. This small canvas from the late 1570s draws on those faces. It follows a drawing in the Louvre, catalogued there as Michelangelo giving an anatomy lesson to the great artists of his time, and figures in the drawing have been identified by comparison with Vasari's woodcuts. The painter is still uncertain. The Borghese places the work in the circle of the Bolognese painter Bartolomeo Passarotti, and also lists Federico Zuccari, the name recorded in the collection's inventory of 1633. Behind the crowd a skeleton hangs in the corner, and a young man sits sketching beside a small flayed figure on a table.