The Anatomist [Paperback]

"O my America, my new-found-land!" Mateo Renaldo Colombo (or Columbus, to give him his English name) might have written in his De re anatomica."

It is no accident that Federico Andahazi draws a parallel between his Renaissance hero, the anatomist Mateo Colombo, and the explorer Christopher Columbus. It is the conceit of his first novel, The Anatomist (beautifully translated from the Spanish by Alberto Manguel), that both Colombos made "equally momentous and disturbing" discoveries. Every schoolchild can tell you what Columbus's was; less well known, perhaps, is that of his countryman and fellow "explorer." "Mateo's America is less distant and infinitely smaller than Christopher's; in fact, it's not much larger than the head of a nail." In short, Mateo Renaldo Colombo discovered the Amor Veneris, the clitoris.

Andahazi makes much of this discovery, not to mention its discoverer: "The discovery of Mateo Colombo's America was, all things considered, an epic counterpointed by an elegy. Mateo Colombo was as fierce and heartless as Christopher. Like Christopher (to use an appropriate metaphor) he was a brutal colonizer who claimed for himself all rights to the discovered land, the female body." Certainly women readers will view this description with at least as much irony as Native Americans regard that other Columbus's "discovery" of a land they had known about all along.

The Anatomist is based on a historical figure and historical fact; what Andahazi provides is his title character's heart and soul. The fictional Colombo is driven by desire for the high-priced courtesan Mona Sofia. Though Mateo adores her, the heartless Sofia regards him as nothing more than a paying customer. After breaking both his heart and his bank account over her, Colombo returns to his native Padua whence he is eventually called to Florence to treat a saintly young widow, Inés de Torremolinos. Inés is "infinitely beautiful," and her illness is "far from common." While examining her, he discovers "between his patient's legs a perfectly formed, erect and diminutive penis." Land ho.

Though Colombo's "discovery," first in Inés and then in other women, offers plenty of opportunity for eroticism, the most compelling aspect of The Anatomist lies in the Church's reaction to De re anatomica, the book Colombo writes detailing his find. The Renaissance may well have signaled the birth of new art, science, and philosophy, but it was also the age of Inquisition--and Colombo's unfolding of "the key to the heart of all women ... the anatomical cause of love" soon lands him in prison on charges of heresy and Satanism. The trial, Mateo's defense, and the surprising aftermath make for provocative reading and raise The Anatomist above the level of the merely erotic to a more intriguing philosophical plane, one that is sure to prompt a lively discussion or two. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

In a first novel that aroused long-buried passions in his native Argentina, Andahazi takes readers back to the Renaissance in a fact-based satire about a scientist groping his way toward enlightenment. The relationships between religion and science, love and sex, and men and women are some of the themes that Andahazi addresses in his provocative story, which reigned at the top of the Argentinian bestseller list when the book became a literary scandal. During the age of discovery, renowned physician Mateo Colombo takes on an exploration nearly as perilous as the quest of his famous namesake, Christopher Columbus: he discovers the clitoris and scandalizes the religious and temporal powers of 16th-century Italy. Indeed, Colombo's motivations are not purely unselfish: he dreams of winning the love of one Mona Sofia, the most expensive prostitute in Venice. But after publishing his work he finds himself imprisoned and at the mercy of the vacillating political whims of the Vatican. Andahazi writes with wit and economy in prose that alternates between the lyrical and the mock-scholarly (both rendered seamlessly in Manguel's translation). He cleverly lures the reader into a sense of condescension toward Colombo only to underscore, ultimately, how little progress has been made in solving the problems that vexed him, despite several centuries of research, scientific and otherwise. (Sept.) FYI: The Anatomist won Argentina's prestigious Fortabat Prize for a first novel, but the prize was revoked by Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, the heiress who endows the award, on the grounds that the book's subject and style are obscene. Anchor is publishing a simultaneous paperback Spanish edition, El Anatomista.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Matteo Colombo of Padua, capable of rendering the most exquisite anatomical charts and who is in fact the most famous anatomist in Europe, is a Renaissance man infused with the spirit of Leonardo. The dissection of cadavers has long been forbidden by the Church, but it is not for this heresy that Matteo is hounded by the Inquisition. Much as the hands of a musician caress an instrument, his anatomist's hands have learned the magic of roaming a woman's body and, just as his namesake, Cristoforo Colombo, discovered America, Matteo discovers the small erectile organ hidden behind the fleshy labia that is today called the clitoris. And it is for this "crime" that he is imprisoned. Based on the actual historical case, this captivating first novel by a Buenos Aires psychiatrist is unexpectedly light, ironic, sensual, evocative of its era, and a pleasure to read. Recommended for all libraries.
-?Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Argentinian short story writer Andahazi brings his flair for satire to his first novel, an arch improvisation on the life of an actual Italian Renaissance physician. Andahazi's Mateo Colombo, or Columbus, is, like his namesake, an explorer, but his discovery is on a very human scale. To be precise, his America is the Amor Veneris, the "organ that governs the love of women." Yes, this intrepid anatomist happens upon the clitoris and cannot believe his good fortune. He conducts in-depth research with a number of willing prostitutes until rumors begin to fly, and his enemies at the university report him to the authorities. Placed under house arrest in anticipation of his trial for heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, and satanism, he pines for his true love, the most beautiful and scornful whore in all of Italy. Meanwhile, the woman who led him to the promised spot, a pious and philanthropic young widow living in Florence, is praying for his return. Andahazi flirts with the conventions of tragedy, but parody rules, especially when Colombo mollifies his accusers over the course of his pseudoscholarly self-defense by assuring them that women have no soul. Stylistically on a par with Umberto Eco, albeit in a burlesque mode, Andahazi succeeds in exposing the hypocrisy of those inquisitional times, and his novel is definitely a cut above most on the best-seller lists, where it landed after arousing great controversy in Argentina, but it nonetheless rings hollow, eliciting laughter more queasy than jolly. Donna Seaman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"Charmingly salacious...shows off the wonderful wit and narrative gifts of a welcome new Latin American writer." --National Public Radio

"Compelling and complex." --Philadelphia City Paper

"A fascinating book. The way Andahazi communicates the sense of exploration and possibility in Renaissance science and the inextricable links with philosophy and religion are extremely effective...gripping, a pleasure to read, and a very fine novel." --Iain Pears, author of An Instance of the Fingerpost

"With The Anatomist, Andahazi deftly mines that delicious vein of wit and sensuality that runs from Boccaccio to Fellini, while slyly dissecting one of man's oldest obsessions: a woman's pleasure." --Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate

A lyrically written, sensual, and extraordinarily enjoyable novel in which a Renaissance anatomist's astonishing discovery forever changes the female erotic universe.

In sixteenth-centruy Venice, celebrated physician Mateo Colombo finds himself behind bars at the behest of the Church authorities. His is a crime of disclosure, heinous and heretical in the Church's eyes, in that his research threatens to subvert the whole secular order of Renaissance society. Like his namesake Christopher Colombus, he has made a discovery of enormous significance for humankind. Whereas Colombus voyaged outward to explore the world and found the Americas, Mateo Colombo looked inward, across the mons veneris, and uncovered the clitoris. Based on historical fact, The Anatomist is an utterly fascinating excursion into Renaissance Italy, as evocative of time and place as the work of Umberto Eco, and reminiscent of the earthy sensuality of Gabriel Garc&#237a M&#225rquez. Perceptive and stirring, it ironically exposes not only the social hypocracies of the day, but also the prejudices and sexual taboos that may still be with us four hundred years later.

International acclaim for The Anatomist:

"A fascinating book. The way Andahazi communicates the sense of exploration and possibility in Renaissance science, and the inextricable links with philosophy and religion are extremely effective."
--Iain Pears, author of An Instance of the Fingerpost

"With The Anatomist, Andahazi deftly mines that delicious vein of wit and sensuality that runs from Boccaccio to Fellini, while slyly dissecting one of man's oldest obsessions: a woman's pleasure."
--Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate

"A universally relevant sexual farce, a stinging challenge to all systems of belief from the past four hundred years, a timely publishing event--and an elegantly written novel."
--La Prensa (Buenos Aires)

"His knowledge of his epoch and his capacity for invention situate Andahazi among his European contemporaries such as Patrick Suskind, author of Perfume."
--Página 30 (Buenos Aires)

"Four centuries after Colombo's discovery, this story has not lost its power of subversion."
--Le Figaro (Paris)

"Andahazi carries us into an erudite, erotic, philosophical fantasy, a fantasy which is also filled with irony."
--Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"Charmingly salacious...shows off the wonderful wit and narrative gifts of a welcome new Latin American writer." --National Public Radio

"Compelling and complex." --Philadelphia City Paper

"A fascinating book. The way Andahazi communicates the sense of exploration and possibility in Renaissance science and the inextricable links with philosophy and religion are extremely effective...gripping, a pleasure to read, and a very fine novel." --Iain Pears, author of An Instance of the Fingerpost

"With The Anatomist, Andahazi deftly mines that delicious vein of wit and sensuality that runs from Boccaccio to Fellini, while slyly dissecting one of man's oldest obsessions: a woman's pleasure." --Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate

A resident of Buenos Aires, Federico Andahazi was born in 1963. His short stories have received many awards, and The Anatomist is the winner of Argentina's prestigious Fortabat Prize. This is his first novel.

The Dawn of Observation

"O my America, my new-found-land!" Mateo Renaldo Colombo (or Columbus, to  give him his English name) might have written in his De re anatomica.[See Note 1] Not a boastful cry like "Eureka!" but rather a mournful lament, a bitter parody of his own misadventures and misfortunes, compared to his Genoese namesake, Christopher. The same surname and, perhaps, the same destiny. But they share no common blood and the death of one takes place barely ten years after the birth of the other. Mateo's America is less distant and infinitely smaller than Christopher's; in fact, it's not much larger than the head of a nail. And yet, it was to remain secreted away until the year of the death of its discoverer and, in spite of its insignificant size, its discovery was equally momentous and disturbing.

It is the Age of the Renaissance. The verb is "To Discover." It is the  twilight of pure a priori speculation and the abuse of syllogisms,  and the dawn of empiricism, of knowledge based on what can be seen. It is,  quite precisely, the dawn of observation. Perhaps Francis Bacon in England  and Campanella in the Kingdom of Naples chanced upon the fact that while  scholastics were lost in syllogistic labyrinths, the illiterate Rodrigo de  Triana was, at the same time, shouting "Land!" and, without knowing it,  heralding in a new philosophy based on observation. Scholasticism (as the  Church had finally understood) was not profitable enough or, at least,  seemed less useful than the sale of indulgences, ever since God had  decided to soak money out of sinners.

The new science is good as long as it helps to bring in gold. It is good  as long as it doesn't contradict the truth of Holy Writ or, what is even  more important, a magistrate's writ of property. Just as the sun no longer  spun its path around the Earth (something which obviously didn't stop  happening from one moment to the next), geometry had begun to chafe  against the confines of its own paper landscape and had set off to  colonize the three-dimensional space of topology. This is the greatest  achievement of Renaissance painting: if Nature is written in mathematical  characters (as Galileo says), painting must be the source of a new vision  of Nature. The Vatican frescoes are a mathematical epic: witness the  conceptual abyss that separates Lorenzo de Monaco's Nativity from  The Triumph of the Cross over the apse of the Capella della  Pietà. For similar reasons, not a single map is left unchanged. The  cartography of Heaven changes as well as that of Earth and that of the  body. Here now are the anatomical maps that have become the new  navigational charts of surgery. And thus we return to our Mateo  Colombo.

Encouraged perhaps by the fact of sharing a name with the Genoese  admiral, Mateo Colombo decided that his destiny, too, was to discover. And  so he set off to sea. Of course, his waters were not those of his  namesake. He was the greatest anatomical explorer of his time; among his  more modest discoveries is nothing less than the circulation of the blood,  anticipating by half a century the Englishman Harvey's demonstration in  De motus cordes et sanguinis. And yet, even this astonishing  discovery is of little importance compared to his America.

The fact is that Mateo Colombo was never able to see his discovery in  print, since his book was not allowed to appear until the very year of his  death, in 1559. One had to be careful with the Doctors of the Church. The  cautionary examples are almost too numerous. Three years earlier, Lucio  Vanini "chose" to be burned by the Inquisition in spite of (or because of)  his statement declaring that he would not give his opinion on the immortality of the soul until he became "old, rich and German."[See Note 2] And certainly Mateo Colombo's discovery was far more dangerous than Lucio Vanini's opinion--even without considering the aversion our anatomist felt toward fire and the stench of burnt flesh, above all if the flesh was his own.

NOTES
1. De re anatomica, Venice, 1559, Bk XI, Ch. XVI.
2. A. Weber, A History of European Philosophy.


The Century of Women

The sixteenth century was the century of women. The seed sowed a hundred years earlier by Christine de Pisan flowered throughout Europe with the sweet scent of The Sayinge of True Lovers. It is certainly not by chance that Mateo Colombo's discovery took place when and where it did. Until the sixteenth century, history had been recounted in a deep masculine voice. "Wherever one looks, there she is, always present: from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, always on the domestic, economic, intellectual, and public stage, on the battlefront and in moments of private leisure, we find the Woman. Usually, she is busy at her daily tasks. But she is also present in the events that build, transform or tear apart society. From one end to the other of the social spectrum, she occupies all places and those who watch her constantly speak of her presence, often with fear," write Natalie Zemon and Arlette Farge in their  History of Women.[See Note 1]

Mateo Colombo's discovery happens precisely when women, whose place had always been indoors, began to conquer, gradually and subtly, the world outside, emerging from behind the walls of convents and retreats, from whorehouses or from the warm but no less monastic sweetness of home. Timidly, woman dares argue with man. With some exaggeration, it has been said that the "battle of the sexes" begins in the sixteenth century. Whether this is true or not, this is the age in which womanly matters become an acceptable subject for discussion among men.

Under these circumstances, what was Mateo Colombo's "America"? No doubt, the borders between discovery and invention are far more vague than they might seem at first glance. Mateo Colombo (the time has come to say it) discovered that which every man has dreamt of at some moment or other: the magic key that unlocks women's hearts, the secret that governs the mysterious driving force of female love; that which, from the beginnings of History, wizards and witches, shamans and alchemists, have sought by means of brews, all manner of herbs or through the favor of gods or demons; that which every man in love has always longed for, when wounded, through unkindness, by the object of his troubles and sorrows. And also, of course, that which is dreamt of by kings and rulers in their sheer lust for omnipotence: namely, the instrument that subjugates the volatile female will. Mateo Colombo searched, traveled and finally found the "sweet land" he longed for: "the organ that governs the love of women." The Amor Veneris (such is the name the anatomist gave it, "if I may be allowed to give a name to the things by me discovered") was the true source of power over the slippery, shadowy free will of women. Certainly, such a finding had many serious consequences. "To what calamities would Christianity not be subjected if the female object of sin were to fall into the hands of the hosts of Satan?" the scandalized Doctors of the Church asked. "What would become of the profitable business of prostitution if any poor hunchback might obtain the love of the most expensive of courtesans?" asked the rich proprietors of the splendid Venetian brothels. And, worst of all, what would happen if the daughters of Eve were to discover that, between their legs, they carried the keys to both Heaven and Hell?

The discovery of Mateo Colombo's America was, all things considered, an epic counterpointed by an elegy. Mateo Colombo was as fierce and heartless as Christopher. Like Christopher (to use an appropriate metaphor) he was a brutal colonizer who claimed for himself all rights to the discovered land, the female body.

Beyond what Amor Veneris meant to society, another controversy was sparked by what it was really supposed to be. Did the organ discovered by Mateo Colombo actually exist? Perhaps this is a useless question which must be replaced by another: did the Amor Veneris ever exist? Ultimately, things are nothing but the words that name them. Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Apeletur (the full name with which its discoverer christened the organ) had a strong heretical ring to it. The question of whether the Amor Veneris coincides with the less apostate and more neutral kleitoris ("tickling"), which alludes to effects rather than causes, is one that would later concern historians of the body. The Amor Veneris existed for reasons other than anatomical; it existed not only because it inaugurated a New Woman but also because it sparked a tragedy.

What follows is the story of a discovery.

What follows is the chronicle of a tragedy.

NOTES
1. A History of Women in the West, Harvard, 1993.

The Trinity

On the other side of Monte Veldo, in the Via Bocciari, close to the Church of the Holy Trinity, stood the Bordello del Fauno Rosso, the most expensive whorehouse in Venice, whose splendor had no rival in the whole of the western world. The brothel's main attraction was Mona Sofia, the most expensive whore in Venice: in the whole of Europe none could be called more splendid. She was greater even than the legendary Lenna Grifa and, just like Lenna Grifa, Mona Sofia toured the streets of Venice reclining on a covered litter, borne by two Moorish slaves. Just like Lenna Grifa, Mona Sofia kept at the litter's head a Dalmatian bitch, an...