Cor Fabrica

Cor Fabrica is based on one of the six muscle-figures in Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, published in Basel in 1543 — the foundational anatomical text in Western medicine — by a physician twenty-eight years old, a dwarf, a virgin, who insisted on doing his own dissections rather than relying on barbers, and who scrutinized ancient anatomies against the bodies in front of him.

The dissections themselves were messy, fast, violent. Bodies rotted under midday sun. Cut parts were thrown to dogs beneath the table or given burial, depending on local custom. What Vesalius produced from this work was not only a record of the body opened, but a record of himself doing the opening — and in his book, the dissector and the dissected stand together, two bodies completing each other. The plates were cut into pear wood, the material of flutes and violins, parallel to the grain, then pressed into paper. Six muscle-figures, layer by layer, the body taken apart toward the bone, against the calm Padua hills.

Cor Fabrica takes the most dissected of these figures — chest emptied, body deconstructed, face still recognizable — and translates it into ten feet of mirror-polished stainless steel. The Renaissance anatomical figure leaves the page and enters the civic. The mirror surface returns the sky and the viewer's own body to itself: the body laid open by medicine becomes, simultaneously, the body the medical gaze never quite contained.

The work is to be permanently sited on Harvey Milk Street, in Hillcrest, San Diego's LGBTQ+ Cultural District. There, Vesalius's body — almost genderless, looking outward from a Renaissance folio — will stand in a neighborhood whose own histories of bodies, illness, care, and survival give the figure new ground to stand on. As both a practicing physician and an artist, I approach Vesalius not as iconography but as a living question — what knowledge of the body does the medical tradition produce, and what does that tradition leave out.