A Persian Anatomical Image in a non-Muslim Manuscript from Gujarat

The Tradition of Manşūr

In 1396 (798/799), two hundred years before Vesalius, the Persian author Manşūr ibn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf ibn Faqīh Ilyās composed a treatise on anatomy entitled Taşrīḥ-i Manşūrī that summarized many of the observations of Galen. It was not the first such treatise to be composed in the Islamic world, but it was the first to be accompanied by drawings of the human body in anatomical detail. About seventy manuscripts containing these drawings survive to the present day, scattered in libraries from Baghdad to Paris, and of course in the Wellcome Library in London.

This tradition of anatomical illustrations has been known to medical historians as the Fünfbilderserie or “Five-picture” series since the early study by Karl Sudhoff.¹ In fact, as the series has become better known through the study of a wider sampling of manuscripts, it has become clear that it consists of six, seven, or even more standard images. This Persian tradition of anatomical illustration has many interesting features and questions associated with it, which have more recently been discussed by Roger French, Emilie Savage-Smith, and others.² For the present purposes, however, it is sufficient for us to see one of these images, in order to recognize the main pictorial details of this tradition. Figure 1 shows an example. These figures typically face the viewer (although one of the other standard figures faces away), the legs are bent, the hands are on the thighs, the head is circular, the internal organs, including intestines, are displayed, and labelled with text.

Figure 1.

An anatomical image from the Taşrīḥ-i Manşūrī tradition, 1576. (Wellcome Or. MS Persian 613(B). Wellcome Library, London.)

After Islam, and in particular the Mughal dynasty, had established itself decisively as a cultural power in the South Asian subcontinent, manuscripts such as these were copied in India as well as Persia and elsewhere. For example, C A Storey lists a manuscript copy in Lahore.³

Indeed, it is likely that the image in Figure 1 was actually painted in India, since the bulk of the Wellcome Persian collection was acquired in India in the early twentieth century.⁴ However, documentation for the provenance of this particular manuscript is not available.

A Manşūrī Image in India

Having familiarized ourselves with the stylistic features of the Taşrīḥ-i Manşūrī anatomical images, let us turn to a recently identified image of the same type, but in a Hindu setting. The image in Figure 2 was first published in a popular study of tantric art.⁵ The image was identified as a tantric illustration of the “nāḍīs, subtle channels of the human body”. However, an acquaintance with the Taşrīḥ-i Manşūrī series makes it immediately clear that Figure 2 is an adaptation derived from the Persian tradition of anatomical illustration. It is a medical, not a tantric or mystical image. The image does not illustrate nāḍīs, but the veins, arteries, and intestinal tract. The text surrounding the image is a mixture of Sanskrit and old Gujarati, which places the image in western India. The painting was formerly in the Hamburg collection of Jan Wichers, but a few years ago it came into the collection of Wellcome Library in London.

Figure 2.

Indian anatomical painting c. eighteenth century, western India. In the Taşrīḥ-i Manşūrī style, but in an old-Gujarati manuscript. (Wellcome MS Indic δ 74. Photo Wellcome Library, London.)

The text and image await detailed study, but it is plain that the text presents a mixture of ideas from medicine and the tantric view of the body. The text-labels on the body are a mixture of Sanskrit medical names and Persian names in both Persian and Devanāgarī scripts. In spite of the purely medical and non-Indian background of the Taşrīḥ-i Manşūrī tradition which clearly inspired the Indian image, it does appear that cakras have been added to the spinal column, albeit very faintly and imperfectly. Mythical and astrological animal images have also been added below the image. This suggests that the Indian artist felt compelled by his artistic and cultural background to assimilate the image, in a limited way, to the common type of cakra/meditator image of Figure 3, which had from an early period become the sole manner of representing the interior of the human body in Indian art.

Figure 3.

The body as locus of tantric cakras. (Wellcome MS Indic δ 511. Wellcome Library, London.)

The image in Figure 2 is not dated, but may be placed to approximately the same period as the eighteenth-century Nepalese anatomical painting in Figure 4, if not slightly earlier. This latter image shows the body strictly in accordance with the classical Indian medical system, Āyurveda. It is not connected with tantra or mysticism, and shows internal receptacles and conduits as described in Sanskrit texts on medicine. It is to be located within the tradition of Tibetan bloodletting/moxa illustration, but with adaptation to āyurvedic anatomical theory.

Figure 4.

Nepalese anatomical man, c. eighteenth century (Wellcome Iconographic Collection 574912i. Wellcome Library, London.)

If the Gujarati manuscript of Figure 2 is earlier than Figure 4, then it is the earliest Hindu anatomical painting presently known from the Indian subcontinent.