The NYT staff whips out their decoder rings in an attempt to solve an oddly contorted neck and beard in the Sistine Chapel.

Art historians and scientists have teamed up to produce an article that justifies anyone’s dire predictions for the death of art history. Some brainiacs at Johns Hopkins University claim to have discovered the outline of a human brain and stem in Michelangelo’s “The Separation of Light from Darkness.” Apparently, however, this isn’t even the first hidden anatomy lesson postulated to exist in the Sistine Chapel:

“In 1990, in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a physician described what he saw as a rendering of the human brain in the Creation of Adam, the panel showing God touching Adam’s finger. And one physician, a professor of medicine at Baylor University, published an article in a medical journal in 2000 suggesting that Michelangelo had included a drawing of a kidney in another ceiling panel. The author was, perhaps not coincidentally, a kidney specialist.”

The journal Neurosurgery, however, is hardly eBay, and these gentlemen are (hopefully) no amateurs of Dan Brown. A University of Pennsylvania associate professor saucily recalls Sigmund Freud by warning that “sometimes a neck is just a neck,” and we ourselves must suppress an awkward gulp at what organ seems most apparent in the helpful black outlines above. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes…well, maybe I’ve been looking at too much Georgia O’Keefe. ARC