Images of the Mind

German Hygiene Museum, Dresden. Until 30 October.

Generating beautiful images has never been the exclusive preserve of art: scientific representations of the brain have aesthetic value too, as portrayed in an exhibition at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, co-curated with the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic. Images of the Mind presents more than 200 artistic and scientific works depicting the mind from medieval times to the present day. It also illustrates how the evolving imagery of artists has always been firmly rooted in contemporary scientific knowledge.

The Brainbow technique colours individual neurons, here in a slice of mouse hippocampus. Credit: J. LICHTMAN/HARVARD UNIV.

Star names among the artists exhibited include Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Albrecht Dürer, as well as luminaries Caspar David Friedrich and Edvard Munch, and contemporary artists Bill Viola and Antony Gormley. Unusually, works by relatively unknown artists from central Europe are also on show: Bohumil Kubišta's 1911 Epileptic Woman is a masterly portrayal of emotional torment.

No less of a draw is the historical scientific imagery. Sketches by 1906 Nobel prizewinners Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal are paired to illustrate a legendary scientific dispute. When they examined brain tissue under a microscope, each saw — and drew — a different structure. Golgi sketched a continuous web of cells; Cajal correctly depicted individual cells, or neurons.

Also on view are newly discovered drawings by neuroanatomist Korbinian Brodmann, who mapped the human cerebral cortex in 1908, and stunning images created using Jeff Lichtman's and Joshua Sanes's Brainbow technique. Developed at Harvard University in 2007, the method uses different colours to pick out individual neurons in a brain slice.

The curators match the quality of the gathered objects with a fascinating narration of the history of mind imagery. The earliest exhibits are eleventh-century manuscripts depicting the Aristotelian understanding of cognitive processes. In the Renaissance, anatomists dissected corpses and drew, beautifully, what they saw, providing templates for artists to paint more realistically. Portraitists quickly attempted to go further, to capture the soul of their subjects as well as their external proportions. Rembrandt's series of tiny, detailed self-portraits in different emotional states encapsulates this perfectly.

Depictions of the mind changed again in the twentieth century, when Sigmund Freud divided the psyche into the conscious and unconscious. Artists such as Kubišta began to explore the fractured mind more abstractly — by then, photography was in any case capturing the realism to which they had formerly striven.

During the past few decades, scientists have described the brain in ever greater electrical, molecular and anatomical detail. Artists have responded, often questioning whether the wet, electrical mass of the physical brain could alone host the mind. Perhaps they are anticipating new neuroscientific understanding of the powerful ways in which environment shapes the brain. For both artists and scientists, the exhibition is a reminder that the mind remains a mysterious moving target.