The murals Diego Rivera executed for the National Institute of Cardiology in Mexico City (figures 1 and 2) are a testament to his talents as a painter as well as to his prodigious energy. The History of Cardiology consists of two panels of 6 m by 4 m and were completed in time for the inauguration of the new institute building on 18 April 1944.
Rivera is the 20th century's greatest exponent of fresco painting. A bravura example of his virtuosity can be found at the bottom right of the first panel, near where he signed the work. The 16th century anatomist Andreas Vesalius holds in his bloodied hand a human heart, its surface mottled and glistening, having been dissected from the pallid cadaver whose head appears to jut into our space. Confronting the viewer almost at eye level with this gory trompe l'oeil spectacle, Rivera has pulled off a real heart stopper...
...One possible influence may have been a set of frescoes depicting the history of medicine painted by a follower of Rivera a few years earlier at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. Bernard Zakheim, a Jewish emigre from Poland, travelled to Mexico to work alongside Rivera in the 1930s, and after his return to the San Francisco Bay area undertook a number of mural commissions. Rivera very likely saw the murals, which pitched modern medicine against religious and superstitious practices, during a stay in San Francisco in 1940-1. Chevez may also have
known about the murals from a book published in Mexico in 1942 by the physiologist J J Izquierdo.2 Chevez's notes for Rivera show that the clash and eventual triumph of science over superstition were present from the outset in his conception of the cardiology murals...
Image Credit: 2005 BANCO DE MEXICO DIEGO RIVERA & FRIDA KAHLO MUSEUMS TRUST. AV. CINCO DE MAYO NO. 2, CENTRO, DEL. CUAUHTEMOC 06059, MEXICO, D.F.
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