Skeleton

early 1540s

Skeleton, early 1540s. Battista Franco (Italian, c. 1510–1561). Pen and brown ink; incised; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Claude Cassirer 1964.380 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.