1544
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Skeleton is a 1544 by Battista Franco Veneziano, a Renaissance work, depicting Anatomy, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This painting shows a bony skeleton standing on a plank. The bones look real. The background is plain. It’s one of only a few skeleton drawings from this time. Before this, artists rarely showed skeletons so clearly. Michelangelo helped change that by studying real bodies during dissections. This work makes you wonder how artists learned anatomy. Look next at Battista Franco (Italian, c. 1510–1561).
Michelangelo was among the first artists in Europe to attend a human dissection and to adopt anatomical knowledge as a necessity for depicting the human figure. These drawings of anatomically accurate skeletons by Battista Franco reflect the increased—and slightly macabre—interest in the interior workings of the human body inspired in part by Michelangelo’s example.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Battista Franco Veneziano (c. 1510 - 1561), baptized Giovanni Battista Franco, was an Italian Mannerist painter and printmaker in etching active in Rome, Urbino, and Venice in the mid 16th century. He is also known as…
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