Nicolaus Steno’s myology in light of Johannes van Horne’s muscle atlas

Overview & Synopsis

In his book on muscles, the Elementorum myologiæ specimen (Florence, 1667), Steno praised a particular group of people who, in his opinion, contributed to a better understanding of the anatomy of muscles, namely painters. It was almost as if, for Steno, painters knew more about muscles than anatomists. The recent discovery of Johannes van Horne’s (1621-1670) muscle atlas at the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé in Paris opened new landscapes to study Steno’s admiration of painters and the epistemic role of his anatomical illustrations. Steno most likely had Van Horne’s atlas in mind when he praised the activity of painters. In research we recently published, we argued that Steno not only shared Van Horne’s interest in illustrating the muscles, but also that he deviated from Van Horne precisely because of the importance observations had in his anatomical research. The following is a summary of our findings. We redirect our readers to our research paper for more details.