Abstract EN:

During Ancient Times and the Middle Ages, knowledge of the human body was premised not only on its linguistic representation but also, by the middle of the XIVth Century, on the production of images: this was the period when practices of dissection came to the fore as the unavoidable means for anatomical research. My thesis deals with the historical evolution which allowed the body to be seen in a scientific light and gave it aesthetic visibility. Relying on the model of meta-language, I study the transmission of anatomical knowledge and how the human body became both a linguistic and a philosophical concept. Indeed, traditional structures of knowledge changed and thereby prepared an important turning point for the development of theory and practice. The first illustrated anatomical treatises, based on dissection, gave birth to a veritable "imagistic methodology" and prepared the "visibility" that Andrea Vesalius and his followers gave to the human body. This visibility underscores not only the body’s scientific meaning but also its metaphorical potential. I then focus on the relationship between artists and anatomists: the thesis closes with the anatomy lesson as a full-fledged artistic genre which not only gives scientific visibility to the human body but also allows it to be "opened up" as an artistic object.