Last week’s article covered fitness during the Dark Ages (read here) and the influence of Muslim physicians. This week’s article cover the impact of Renaissance thinking on exercise and the human body.
More Nudes, Please
Through Medieval times and into the Renaissance, Christianity held a tight grip on society. They saw Greeks and Romans and excessive, and attempted to shun their ideas. Among those was their celebration of the human body and athleticism with nude statues and other artwork.
Nude portraits were extremely rare until the Renaissance, when they had a rebirth. Michelangelo’s statue of David is an example of the return of athletic, nude figures. Though they might’ve been controversial at the time, there was the beginning of a change in attitude towards the human body from a symbol of sin to something to be celebrated.
Even though art was beginning to change, society as a whole was still shunning Greek and Roman ideas of the human body. Among those was exercise, which was seen as a self-indulgent activity (possibly with sexual connotations). Instead of being seen as healthy, it was seen as a means for warrior
While society’s view of exercise wouldn’t change until much later, key scientific discoveries occurred during the Renaissance that changed the way scholars saw the human body.
The Scientific Revolution
In 1543, the mathematician and astronomoer Nicolaus Copernicus died. His famous contribution to science was the idea that the earth orbits the sun. In that same year, a lesser-known scientist named Andreas Vesalius published a book called De Humani Corporis Fabrica (on the fabric of the human body).
Much like Copernicus, his work was revolutionary. It had the most accurate anatomical drawings and ideas up to that point in history. Vesalius was a devout follower of the works of Galen, until he started to notice some inconsistencies in his work.
The drawings in his book were some of the most accurate up to that point in human history. It’s interesting to note that Leonardo Da Vinci created equally, if not more stunningly accurate anatomical drawings a few decades before Vesalius.
Da Vinci, who made many notes about the workout programs he developed for himself, made groundbreaking discoveries in human anatomy. Unfortunately, his works weren’t published until hundreds of years later.
Instead, Andreas Vesalius takes the credit for publishing the most accurate anatomical work since Galen. After noticing some of the mistakes Galen made, Vesalius began teaching others about the errors he found. This was blasphemous at the time, since Galen was still considered the master of the human body and his works were taught at most universities.
His rebellious streak landed him in court, but he was never sent to jail for his works. A few hundred years later, Charles Darwin used his anatomy book to observe that humans were remarkably similar to other animals, contributing to his theory of evolution.
The Body As A Machine
The works of Vesalius mark the first time Galen was truly questioned and surpassed since the 2nd century. His works were still taught religiously in universities in the 16th century.
An English scientist named William Harvey expanded on the works of Vesalius. He was a physicist as well, and applied his knowledge to describe the way blood flows through the body. Unlike Vesalius, who believed the body was a product of intelligent design, Harvey saw it as a machine. That allowed him to shed disregard a religious perspective and look at the body from a purely scientific one.
Harvey used his knowledge of physics to view the body as a machine. He figured out that blood moves in a circular motion through the body, driven by the beating of the heart. That’s quite unlike Galen, who thought that blood was produced by the liver, and instead of circulating blood and air would simply ebb and flow through the body (a very confusing theory).
The view that the human body is a machine allowed scientists to draw new, more accurate conclusions. They shed the holistic view that humans had carried throughout history and began to break the body down into component parts.
Biomechanics and Human Movement
Shortly after Harvey’s landmark work was published, a young physicist and mathematician named Giovanni Alfonso Borelli was working on a new form of science. The field he created is now known as biomechanics, which is the study of animal and human movement using physics.
Borelli viewed the body as a machine in the same way that Harvey did. He described the way the circulatory system works, how joints move, how muscles contribute to movement and more.
Despite the groundbreaking scientific discoveries of the Renaissance, exercise wasn’t seen as a foundation of normal life. There were no public gyms and no grand essays on the importance of activity. Those would have to wait for a couple hundred more years.
Next week I’ll discuss the reintegration of fitness into society during the physical education movement.