The melancholy of anatomyPatricia Fara

Clare College, Cambridge, CB2 1TL, UK

In the middle of the 17th century, two founding fellows

of the Royal Society – John Evelyn and William Petty –

commissioned portraits of themselves with skulls. The

paintings were commemorative, because Evelyn was

celebrating his engagement and Petty had recently

acquired an anatomical post at Oxford, but both sitters

also intended their pictures to serve as reminders of

mortality.

When the diarist John Evelyn got engaged, he decided tohave his portrait painted as a gift for his future wife(Figure 1). He had fallen passionately in love with MaryBrowne, who was barely 13 but apparently behaved withthe gravitas of an adult. ‘I made this creature my wife andfound a pearl’, rejoiced Evelyn. To accompany thiswedding present for his teenage bride, he wrote a maritalmanual called ‘Instructions Œconomiques’, designed toinitiate her into the mysteries of wifely duties. Evelynwould, he promised (or threatened?), teach Browne how tobecome a ‘Help-meet for me.’ Like many daughters, sheevidently felt that she had been transferred from one typeof male custody to another, because she later wrote thatEvelyn educated her like ‘a Father, a Lover, a Friend andHusband’ [1].

Portraits appear to capture a sitter at one particularinstant in time, and so might seem to generate afundamentally different effect from poetry or music,which operate sequentially but have no solid existence inspace. Nevertheless, artists have devised various ways ofportraying the passage of time within a two-dimensionalimage, and one of the oldest is to include symbols oftransience. Many anatomy books – especially Dutch ones –included pictures of skulls propped up on hourglasses orholding Father Time’s scythe. To symbolize impermanencepainters used snuffed-out candles, fragile bubbles, clocksand decayed trees in vanitas pictures, which wereintended to drive home the message that life is short.The term vanitas comes from a biblical passage exhortingreaders to renounce the desires of this world in prep-aration for the next – ‘Vanity of vanities, saith thePreacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity’ [2].

In the original version of the portrait of Evelyn, he helda small image of Browne in his left hand: it might havebeen a miniature hanging from the gold chain loopedround his neck. But plans changed, and in 1648 Evelynrecorded in his diary that ‘I sate for my picture, in whichthere is a Death’s head’ [3]. The skull beneath Evelyn’spampered hand was a memento mori (Latin for ‘rememberthat you must die’) – a perpetual reminder to the newly

Corresponding author: Fara, P. (pf10006@cam.ac.uk).Available online 12 January 2005

www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter Q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

wedded couple that life’s span is limited. This starkiconographical message was reinforced with words. TheGreek motto from Plato across the top means ‘Repentanceis the beginning of wisdom’, and Evelyn’s sheet of papercarries a Latin quotation from Seneca’s De Brevitatæ Vitæ[On the Shortness of Life] stressing the importance ofpreparing for death.

Evelyn’s languid pose, heavy eyes and the subduedpalette of brown and blue make his portrait a classic studyof melancholy. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,repeatedly republished in the 17th century, looked like amedical treatise, but gently poked fun at dedicatedscholars who flaunted this fashionable affliction. However,Evelyn seems to have been haunted by some prescientforeknowledge that a gloomier future lay ahead. Afterthree sons died, both husband and wife plunged intodepression, and Evelyn imposed a secluded, semi-mon-astic regime which Browne found stifling. As he took on

Review Endeavour Vol.29 No.1 March 2005

Figure 1. John Evelyn by Robert Walker (1648). Image supplied by, and reproduced

with permission of, the National Portrait Gallery, London (www.npg.org.uk).

. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2004.10.009

Figure 2. William Petty by Isaac Fuller (c.1649–50). Image supplied by, and

reproduced with permission of, the National Portrait Gallery, London (www.npg.

org.uk).

Review Endeavour Vol.29 No.1 March 2005 21

more and more public responsibilities – including his workas a founding member of the Royal Society – Evelyn agedrapidly and death often preyed on his mind. Soon heacquired ‘a peruq of grey haires, before I was of Age toCountenance the Decays of Nature’ [4]. Here the promi-nent skull reminds viewers to do precisely that –‘Countenance the Decays of Nature.’

Artists had flourished at the court of Charles I, but oncethe English Civil War started they were forced to find newpatrons. For his engagement portrait, Evelyn choseRobert Walker, a prolific painter whose other famoussitters included Oliver Cromwell and some prominentParliamentarians. Evelyn himself avoided the Civil Warby travelling abroad, but although he spent severalmonths studying anatomy and physiology at Padua, itseems unlikely that the skull in his portrait is intended asa testament to his medical prowess. By contrast, his futurecolleague at the early Royal Society, William Petty(Figure 2), selected the same artistic prop to advertisehis newly acquired teaching position in anatomy at OxfordUniversity.

Like all symbols, painted skulls could resonate withseveral meanings. In the portrait of John Tradescant, thetraveller whose collection formed the basis of Oxford’sAshmolean Museum (http://www.ashmol.ox.ac.uk/), askull is covered with moss, which serves as an additionalindication of passing time as well as being a medicinalcure for epilepsy. Petty might be proclaiming his confi-dence in methodical anatomy, but he deliberately chose askull, not a femur or a humerus. Delicately balancing it onhis fingertips, he is inviting a direct comparison betweenhis own living face and the bones that he will inevitablybecome.

Petty had studied medicine in the Netherlands, and heis pointing to detailed drawings of two skulls in Adriaanvan den Spieghel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On theStructure of the Human Body, 1627). Spieghel modelledhimself on Vesalius, who also came from Brussels: he heldVesalius’ former chair at Padua, he gave his own book thesame title as Vesalius’, and – like his predecessor – heshowed dissected bodies holding realistic yet gruesomeposes. The frontispiece of his book features a skeletonstanding on a pedestal adorned with an ape holding anapple, traditional symbol of the Fall in the Garden ofEden [5].

Petty’s painter was Isaac Fuller, who was then living inOxford. Contemporaries reported that he was a fine artistwith a good knowledge of anatomy, although – followingMichelangelo – he tended to over-emphasize musculature.Fuller also acquired a reputation for being chronicallydrunk and painting in an idiosyncratic style. After aday of being shown around Oxford by ChristopherWren, Evelyn commented that Fuller’s altarpiece in AllSouls chapel ‘will not hold long. It seems too full ofnakeds for a chapel’ [6].

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Later promoted to become Oxford’s professor of anat-omy, Petty was renowned as a miracle worker because hehelped to revive the corpse of a young woman who hadbeen hanged. Within a few years, he was organizing theDown Survey of Ireland, although Petty is mainlycommemorated nowadays for his Political Arithmetick, akey founding text of economic statistics. Appropriately,Evelyn claimed that Petty was also the author of a bookthat systematically analyzed mortality records: death wasnever far away in the 17th century.

References

1 Harris, F. (1997) Living in the neighbourhood of science: Mary Evelyn,Margaret Cavendish and the Greshamites. In Women, Science andMedicine 1500-1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society (Hunter,L. and Hutton, S., eds), pp. 198–217, Sutton Publishing (Stroud, UK),(op. cit. pp. 200–201)

2 The Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:23 Evelyn, J. (1996). The Diary of John Evelyn (vol. 2), Routledge (London,

UK), [op. cit. p. 5 (1 July 1648)]4 Harris, F. (1997), (op. cit. p. 205)5 Roberts, K.B. and Tomlinson, J.D.W. (1992) The Fabric of the Body:

European Traditions of Anatomical Illustration, Clarendon Press(Oxford, UK), (op. cit. pp. 259–272)

6 Evelyn, J. (1996), [op. cit. p. 216 (24 October 1664)]