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Jeremy Logan

Journal

July 20, 2026

Series — Anatomy Studies

anatomy · travel · study

New York: Anatomy, Rare Books, and the Dissection Room

A report from ten days in New York: gestural figure construction at the Art Students League, priceless rare books in the library at New York Academy of Medicine, and cadaver study at Weill Cornell.

Frontispiece

Engraved plate from Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica: an articulated skeleton contemplating a skull.

Ten days in New York, centered around my quest to develop a better understanding of beauty and its expression in the human form. This is a record of my journey.

The League: construction before contour

Tab. I

The facade of the Art Students League building.
Established in 1875, the Art Students League has been a haven for countless artists seeking to learn from the greatest teachers of their times.

The first three days were spent studying the live model.

Rare books at the Academy of Medicine

Tab. II

Engraved plate from Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica: an articulated skeleton contemplating a skull.Engraved écorché plate from Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica: a flayed muscle figure in a landscape.
Plate comparison from the rare-book session: the 1543 Fabrica woodcuts read as both instruction and memento mori.

Tab. III

Engraved plate from Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica: an articulated skeleton contemplating a skull.
  1. Skull: The plate’s vanitas gesture — the skeleton studies a skull, as we study it. The tilt of the cranial mass sets the entire pose.
  2. Pelvis: Vesalius draws the pelvic basin as architecture. In the cadaver lab this read as literal: everything above it stacks, everything below it hangs.

At Weill Cornell the printed plates stopped being illustrations. A cadaver’s forearm, partially dissected, is exactly Rembrandt’s subject in the Tulp portrait — and exactly what the flexor group diagrams promise, except real tissue is wetter, denser, and far less symmetrical.

Tab. IV

Working diagram — inline SVG so it inherits page typography (and can be animated later).
The dissection room enforces a humility the atlas never does: the body is not a diagram that got dirty. The diagram is the body, cleaned up until it lies a little.