Tuesday, December 14, 2004
The Human Form Divined
Anatomy is revealed as art by an awe-inspiring new book that weds photography with high-tech scans.
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The assembled images, by artist and writer Alexander Tsiaras, are the focus of a new book, The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman ($50, Doubleday); a forthcoming Discovery Health Channel documentary, and an exhibit that opened last week at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington.
What makes the bodily depictions so novel is that they are 3-D-seeming visualizations built partly from images once limited to radiology departments and research labs. To create them, Tsiaras merged and layered X-rays, computerized tomography (CT) body scans, magnetic resonance images (MRI) and electron microscope and molecular surveillance views, using software he developed with his colleagues at Anatomical Travelogue, a privately held company in New York.
“Portraiture hasn’t changed in 100 years,” said Tsiaras of his rendering of the human body. “This is where art meets science.”
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“Separation of science and art is a 19th-century thing,” said Tsiaras. “Before that, scientists and artists worked together. ... If you talk to great scientists and great artists, they think similarly.”