(Newser) – Michelangelo used the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to conceal a message the church would have found blasphemous, according to a pair of neuroanatomists. God’s oddly lumpy neck in The Separation of Light from Darkness, a detail that has long puzzled art historians, is actually a completely accurate depiction of the human brain painted by the artist, who was a highly skilled anatomist.
The neuroanatomists haven’t speculated on what Michelangelo meant by including the brain diagram in the image of God, but it could well have been a comment on "the enduring clash between science and religion," neurosurgeon R. Thomas Fields writes in Scientific American. It may also be the case, Field writes, that Michelangelo—who had a strained relationship with the Catholic Church—was signaling that "intelligence and observation and the bodily organ that makes them possible lead, without the necessity of Church, directly to God."
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