Vesalius and Pulicat: Skeletal imagery in seventeenth-century south India

This article identifies the first known instance of visual engagement with the iconic anatomical imagery of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543) east of Istanbul. Two skeleton men from the Fabrica provide the design for skeletal sculptures decorating the Dutch cemetery in the colonial port town of Pulicat, in Tamil Nadu, India. We ask what it meant to engage with these iconic images of European anatomy in a seventeenth-century trading port on the Bay of Bengal, both for those who were responsible for their production and for those who passed by the cemetery. This article argues that the visual solutions of the Pulicat sculptures bring into conversation not only medical anatomy and funerary architecture, but also the artistic traditions of Europe and the Deccan, and, most importantly, the somewhat differing early modern European and Indian approaches to visualizing the skeletal structures of human bodies. The Pulicat sculptures can be productively understood as a potential meeting point for the contemplation of the fragile human body from the perspectives of European and Islamicate anatomy, Christian traditions of natural theology and memento mori, as well as South Indian and especially mystic Sufi asceticism.