It’s probably worth noting that Suk and Tamargo are a medical illustrator and a neurosurgeon respectively. If this were a Rorschach test I would say they’ve got brains on the brain a little to much.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010, 2:24 PM
It’s a common enough pastime on lazy summer days to lie on the grass gazing up at the sky and look for figures and faces in the clouds. But two professors at Johns Hopkins University, the New York Times reports, have turned their gaze from fluffy cumulonimbus clouds to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and believe they have discovered an anatomical drawing of the human brain hidden in plain sight in the first of Michelangelo’s nine panels on the book of Genesis where God separates light from darkness. The viewer of this panel sees God from below as he looks up and rends the darkness from the light. And if the viewer looks closely, Professor Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo insist, they will see in the bulging neck of God “the underside of the brain and the brain stem, with parts of the temporal lobe, the medulla, the pons and other structures clearly drawn.”





June 23rd, 2010 | 2:28 pm
When God reaches out to Adam in the more famous image, the cloud on which God sits is also supposed to be a brain and brain stem.
June 23rd, 2010 | 2:32 pm
Huffington Post did a piece on this last month and noted that there are several anatomical drawings hidden amongst the paintings in the Sistine chapel and discusses possible motives behind them:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-douglas-fields/michelangelos-secret-mess_b_586531.html
I’m not so sure about the brain in God’s neck, but several of the others suggested in the article seem real to me. The scene of God creating Adam really does look like a cross section of a human brain.
June 23rd, 2010 | 5:02 pm
I don’t see a brain. It isn’t even close. The only anatomical drawing I see is a neck, which is what was intended.
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