In 1990 Dr. Frank Meshberger noticed in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam that God and the angels appeared against a brain shaped background (see above image of original and brain overlay). The discovery was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Well, there’s room for interpretation here; maybe it’s a large walnut in cross section and the artist didn’t mean to imply anything sacrilegious—like “For God’s sake use your brain when you read the Bible.” But then just recently in the journal Neurosurgery two Johns Hopkins anatomists, Suk and Tamargo show further evidence that Michelangelo meant it. In Sistine Chapel’s The Separation of Light From Darkness, God’s “Adam’s apple” is in unmistakably shaped like the brainstem all the way up to the optic nerve in the brain.
At the time (~1500 AD) no one was allowed to desecrate the human body by dissecting dead people. Religious censorship went so far that you weren’t supposed to try to find out what people looked like on the inside. Michelangelo dared enough to do it, but not enough to share the secret openly or there’d be no Sistine Chapel fresco.
IRI censorship isn’t as strict; you can cut up as many people as you want. Though you’re still not allowed to see what certain writers are thinking on the inside, even if they’re dead. But if a fresco was ever allowed on the wall of the Jamkaran well, the lucky commissioned artist should keep in mind the hidden message of a great Renaissance artist, “For God’s sake people, use your brains.”
