A Cultural History Told Through Depictions of the Heart: Botticelli to Banksy

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Speaker: Robin Choudhury, professor of cardiovascular medicine, University of Oxford

When Aristotle searched for the first signs of life, he lifted a flap in the shell of a fertilized chick egg and there he saw a beating heart – the self-evident originator of life. The beating heart has fascinated thinkers from Aristotle to Aquinas, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Descartes and Pascal. Across time and place, the story of our understanding of the heart has been richly decorated with images that illuminate the dance between art, religion, philosophy and ‘scientific’ thinking. It is a truly interdisciplinary organ. The secret of our fascination lies in its apparent sentience and automatic and responsive beat.

The mystery of the self-beating heart was solved by Professor Denis Noble (as a graduate student in London in 1960). A demonstration of early biological computation, he solved the puzzle that had hung over the ages. And yet, even as the heart function is understood, it retains all its fascination as a cultural icon. This is the story of The Beating Heart.

This talk is offered both in person and online. Light refreshments will be served.

Robin Choudhury is professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Oxford, Fellow of Balliol College and a practicing cardiologist. He also heads a laboratory working on molecular and cellular mechanisms of heart injury and repair. He has a particular interest in the role of the immune system in cardiovascular diseases. He is a Fellow of Balliol College and of the Royal College of Physicians and is a former Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. In 2013, he led a group that used MRI to test, for the first time in a living subject, the 500-year-old theories of Leonardo da Vinci on the movement of blood across the aortic valve. He lives in London and Oxford with Jasmine Dellal, a documentary film maker.