The handy pig: anatomy, agronomy and animal pain in early modern Italy

This essay explores the representations and uses of animal pain in early modern Italian anatomy and agronomy, focusing on the pig as both an experimental subject and a productive resource. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, anatomists including Andreas Vesalius, Realdo Colombo, Carlo Fracassati and Marcello Malpighi relied on nonhuman bodies–especially pigs and dogs–to investigate the mechanisms of life. The animal’s cry served simultaneously as evidence of suffering and as a confirmation of scientific authority. Concurrently, the agronomist Vincenzo Tanara emphasized the pig’s profitability within rural economies, and the writer Giulio Cesare Croce praised its value to urban life. By combining the history of anatomy, the history of agronomy and the history of food, this study shows how pigs, living and dead, occupied a nexus of compassion and exploitation, anatomical knowledge and food production. The pig reveals a distinctive configuration of early modern knowledge, where ideas about animal utility not only circulated between different knowledge and practices, such as anatomy agronomy and cookery, but were also shaped by the porous boundaries between them.