BALTIMORE ().- Michelangelo, the 16th century master painter and
accomplished anatomist, appears to have hidden an image of the
brainstem and spinal cord in a depiction of God in the Sistine
Chapel's ceiling, a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers
reports. These findings by a neurosurgeon and a medical
illustrator, published in the May Neurosurgery, may explain long
controversial and unusual features of one of the frescoes'
figures. Michelangelo is known to have dissected numerous
cadavers starting in his teenage years, these anatomic studies
aiding him in creating extremely accurate depictions of the
human figure in his sculptures and paintings, notably the statue
of David in Florence and paintings of God and other figures from
the Book of Genesis in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel in Rome. Â
Although the vast majority of subjects in this painting are
considered anatomically correct, art historians and scholars
have long debated the meaning of some anatomical peculiarities
seen on God's neck in the part of th