The labyrinth of the inner ear (courtesy Instituto Cajal del Consjo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas, Madrid, 2017 CSIC)

Santiago Ramn y Cajalwanted to be an artistand photographer, but his physician father encouraged him to go into the medical profession. Even working in neuroscience, the Spaniards interest in visual art ended up proving essential, andhis illustrations continue to appear in textbooks and medical literature.The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramn y Cajal,out now from Abrams Books, accompanies atraveling exhibitionthat opened this January atthe Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota and was organized with the Cajal Institute in Madrid, Spain. Both the book and the showconcentrate on 80 visualizations of the human brain by Cajal, often ordained the father of modern neuroscience.

Cajals drawings depict everythingfrom the cerebral cortex to the hippocampus, and some have not been previously published outside of his scholarly papers. The scientist, who died in 1934, wrote in his autobiography:

Like the entomologist in pursuit of brightly colored butterflies, my attention hunted, in the flower garden of the gray matter [the cerebral cortex], cells with delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, the beatingof whose wings may someday who knows? clarify the secret of mental life.

Cajal was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906, yethe remainsobscure compared to 19th-century scientists such asCharles Darwin andLouis Pasteur. Neuroscientist Larry W. Swanson writes in a book essay that this may bebecause there is no simple means to encapsulate how Cajal and his contemporaries explained and illustrated the workings of the brain as a biological network in an entirely new way, a way that remains foundational to neuroscientists today. Indeed, not every viewer will understand how he was able to discern the information flow of neurons in the retina just by studyingspecimens through amicroscope, but with theirclean lines and directional indications, the illustrationsarevisually striking.

That Cajals drawings remain living documents a century after they were created is at least partly owing to this vitality, which draws on fantasy and the imagination more than we might expect in scientific project, write Lyndel King and Eric Himmel in a collaborative book essay. Cajals forms are drawn with clarity, though never mechanically, and his line is confident and constantly moving: Dendrites and axons, the brains wiring, seem to pulse with life, twisting and turning and bulging and narrowing.

Over five decades, Cajal mademore than 2,900 drawings of the nervous system. His illustrations are so intricatethatits easy to forget he was working from dead tissue rather than a living organ. Decades later, when we can examine more accurate scans of the brain, his work stillconveys a prescient viewof itsinner workings. If the human individual resides anywhere in the body, its in this organ, and Cajals art gives humanity to anatomy while also portrayingitwith scientific precision.

The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramn y Cajalisout now from Abrams Books. The exhibition continues at the Weisman Art Museum (University of Minnesota, 333 E River Road, Minneapolis) throughMay 21.

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The Dynamic Brain Drawings of the Father of Modern Neuroscience - Hyperallergic