As a young boy, UNE adjunct associate professor George Weisz’s family apartment was often awash with the strains of classical and operatic music. This early introduction to arts at a time of great happiness had a profound and lasting influence on George, even as he followed a path into medicine.
Never short on determination, George – now attached to UNE’s School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences – thrived against great odds. As a highly educated Jewish family in Romania, George and his family suffered greatly under two totalitarian regimes, from when George was just four years old. His father disappeared for four years during World War II, sent to hard labour in the woods, eventually reappearing at the end of the war, broken and sick. Forced to flee and start again, George could hardly find solace in school – where he was relegated to the “ghetto bench” at the back.
But bright and driven, George refused to give up his ambitions. Despite the hardships and obstacles, he became a surgeon – a dream he’d had since he was about 10 years old. His love of arts hummed in the background, but work as a spinal and orthopaedic surgeon was all-consuming.
It wasn’t until retirement was in sight that George could finally feed his interest in arts.
From medicine to arts
“Some 30 years ago, in my fifties, I thought, what am I going to do? I don’t play golf or cards, I don’t go to the pub,” George says. “Since my teenage years, I was very interested in arts – in music, painting and opera, so in my early fifties I enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts course at the University of NSW in European Studies. That was so exciting for me!”
I answered Randall’s advertisement in the paper for medical history teachers in the general studies program at UNSW, and we just clicked. We became really firm friends.
Afraid of the threatening “intellectual vacuum” after completing that course 3.5 years later, he quickly enrolled in a Master of Arts – Renaissance Studies at Sydney University, a topic on which he became “hooked”.
His journey into the arts at UNSW also kickstarted what would become a lifelong collaboration and deep friendship with historian Professor Randall Albury, also an adjunct staff member in UNE’s School of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences.
“I answered Randall’s advertisement in the paper for medical history teachers in the general studies program at UNSW, and we just clicked. We became really firm friends. He is a phenomenal gentleman. His brain is phenomenal, he has a great deal of knowledge in art and history. He is the nicest guy you can imagine, always helping others,” George says.
While immersing himself in Renaissance art, it wasn’t long until George’s surgeon’s eye stepped in, and he began to view some of the world’s most loved and famous paintings in a new way.
“One day I looked at one of the paintings and noticed a hand deformity, I showed Randall and said ‘Look, look at the hand – what is it?’ And he was lit up like I was!”
Suddenly, their interests overlapped, sparking a prolific and unique publishing output.
Together, they’ve researched and written almost 50 papers – with more forthcoming – about many dozens of paintings from the Renaissance up to the Impressionist art movements in Europe, documenting a range of deformities either intentionally or accidentally captured.
It’s a specialisation that requires careful examination of paintings and a firm and very specific knowledge of the artists and the times in which they produced their works, to sift out what might be an artistic distortion from what is a genuine deformity depicted.
“It’s a fascinating topic, but apart from that, it gives us some retrospective information about the medical issues that existed 400 to 500 years ago,” George says.
Some papers are studies of particular musculoskeletal deformities depicted in individuals in a specific era and style of painting, some are family studies.
There is a cluster of papers on the ruling family of Florence then Tuscany for 300 years, the Medici family. Afflicted by an ailment passed off as gout at the time, paintings of the family tell another story, that match conclusions made from the examination of exhumed remains: they had very specific congenital deformities of the spine, hands and bones.
One day I looked at one of the paintings and noticed a hand deformity, I showed Randall and said ‘Look, look at the hand – what is it?’ And he was lit up like I was!
There is a study of arthritis in juveniles depicted in some of the European Biedermeier style paintings from the first half of the 19th century, a style known for its dedication to realism, therefore less likely to be an artistic flourish.
George and Randall have even applied their expertise to help settle one of Renaissance art’s hotly debated and longstanding mysteries. After close examination, their assessment of a hand anomaly lends weight to the view that the Portrait of a Halberdier by Jacopo Pontormo, painted sometime around the mid-16th century, depicts a young Duke (later Grand Duke) Cosimo I de’ Medici, rather than the Florentine nobleman Francesco Guardi as others insist.
They found that while the subject’s hand position was typical of many portraits in the Renaissance era, the position of the joints in the fingers could not be similarly explained as stylistic. And the particular anomaly of the joints matched with other recognised portraits of the duke, as well as with his skeletal remains.
How real is realism?
Realism in art cannot simply be assumed, and George and Randall also document the shift in artistic trends from a commitment to realism to ‘beautification’ in Renaissance paintings, including among the works of the greats like Raphael, Botticelli and da Vinci.
“In the first quarter of the 15th century, almost 100 percent of the paintings from the era, at least 95-97 percent – were perfect in anatomical design,” George says. “Then, suddenly everything went berserk. People started to want different deformities depicted, specifically to beautify the hand. Both men and women were shown with their fingers in exaggerated positions, which were presumably thought to be elegant at the time, but which could only occur in a real hand as a pathological condition. All the paintings start to depict these hand deformities, whether by chance or intentionally. This trend tapers off, reversing to normality by 1620.”
George says Renaissance sculpture is even more reliable for realism than painting, and no one meets the perfect standards set by Michelangelo.
“The man was absolutely perfect,” George says. “There is not a single, even faint deformity in Michelangelo’s sculptures. But if you go back to others who are much less of a genius than Michelangelo, you’ll find things like a little bit of twist to the hand, but you have to look at it with medical eyes to see that something’s shorter on the right, or different on the left.”
The double whammy of the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and George’s full retirement from all medical practice was a difficult time for George, who also lamented the lack of opportunity to spend time with Randall.
But George says having his interests in art history to read, write and publish about “saved him” during that difficult time. Overall, his studies have revived the joy he felt when music shaped his early years in Romania.
“I’ve absolutely achieved what I intended to do in retirement. It’s a beautiful topic, fascinating.”
In-text image: Portrait of a Halberdier by Jacopo Pontormo, painted 1529-1530 or 1537, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Inset: close-up of the subject’s left hand.
