Picturing the soul

摘要

Generating beautiful images has never been the exclusive preserve of art: scientific representations of the brain have aesthetic value too, as portrayed in an exhibition at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, co-curated with the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic. Images of the Mind presents more than 200 artistic and scientific works depicting the mind from medieval times to the present day. It also illustrates how the evolving imagery of artists has always been firmly rooted in contemporary scientific knowledge. Star names among the artists exhibited include Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Albrecht Diirer, as well as luminaries Caspar David Friedrich and Edvard Munch, and contemporary artists Bill Viola and Antony Gorm-ley. Unusually, works by relatively unknown artists from central Europe are also on show: Bohumil Kubista's 1911 Epileptic Woman is a masterly portrayal of emotional torment. No less of a draw is the historical scientific imagery. Sketches by 1906 Nobel prizewinners Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramon y Cajal are paired to illustrate a legendary scientific dispute. When they examined brain tissue under a microscope, each saw - and drew - a different structure. Golgi sketched a continuous web of cells; Cajal correctly depicted individual cells, or neurons.