Annals of medical history . vation of the MiddleAges. Mediaeval figurations of dancing andtipsy skeletons occur in plenty, it is true,but, by the time of Holbein, the skeletonhad become the sign and symbol of Deathas the King of Terrors. The question arises: Were these skeletalsymbols of Death a survival of the Epi-curean Graeco-Roman figurations, or werethey derived from the drawings in themanuscript illustrations of anatomy of theMiddle Ages? That the artists of the Mid-dle Ages should have figured Death as askeleton, with scythe or drum, is easy ofexplanation. Death was at hand every-where.
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Annals of medical history . vation of the MiddleAges. Mediaeval figurations of dancing andtipsy skeletons occur in plenty, it is true, but, by the time of Holbein, the skeletonhad become the sign and symbol of Deathas the King of Terrors. The question arises: Were these skeletalsymbols of Death a survival of the Epi-curean Graeco-Roman figurations, or werethey derived from the drawings in themanuscript illustrations of anatomy of theMiddle Ages? That the artists of the Mid-dle Ages should have figured Death as askeleton, with scythe or drum, is easy ofexplanation. Death was at hand every-where. The long succession of devastatingwars and epidemics following the downfall 2 Ibid., p. 18. 225 226 Annals of Medical History of the Roman Empire had paralyzed hopeand human endeavor, and the thoughts ofmankind were constantly turned towardsmortality. But the very character of some upon anatomy, Streeter infers that theseartists acquired their interest in dissectingin precisely this way: How these easy intimacies arose be-. of the early medieval figurations of Deathsuggest kinship with the MS. anatomicaldrawings of the same period, and it is pos-sible that the medieval artists may haveacquired this peculiar type of decorativescheme not beautiful in itself, from associa-tion with physicians who were studyinganatomy by means of dissection. In hisinteresting study of the influence of theFlorentine painters of the Quattrocento tween physic and thcligurative arts wouldbe hard to explain in any other way thanthe one I shall attempt to use, simpleand obvious as it is! It was by the haz-ard of association in one and the sameguild that the anatomists and artists ofFlorence made their magnetic contacts.The painters formed a sub-membrum ofthe Guild of Physicians and Apotheca-ries. They all belong*d—Giotto, Masac- Skeletal and Visceral Anatomy 227 cio, Castagno, Ucello, Verrocchio—to themembrum pictorum of the Guild ofPhysicians and Apothecaries. Masacciojoined the guild first as an a