Searching for Michelangelo's Brains

LONDON—A group of British scientists believe that Michelangelo and other Renaissance painters incorporated imagery of the human brain into their works, reports the Guardian. The idea was developed by the scientist FL Meshberger, but caught on with other scientists as well; a team of four British neurosurgeons, neuroscientists, and radiologists have together conducted a study, "Brain Imaging in the Renaissance, that appears in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. "The idea came to me while looking at Raffaello's Transfiguration," says Alessandro Paluzzi. "Being a neurosurgeon, I could immediately see a brain in the painting." Partly as a joke, the team went searching for other examples, which they believe that artists, fascinated by the anatomical discoveries of the time, concealed as religious imagery in their paintings in order not to be accused of being blasphemous or heretical, an offense punishable by death.