Virginia made a very nice remark post, in the context of Caravaggio, about beheading prefiguring Descartes. I'll just remark here that it also follows Copernicus (Caravaggio's Medusa is maybe sixty years after). The connection to the earth severed, and with it a certain relation to the physical body.

But while, speaking broadly, one might have expected that the Copernican revolution would make people less self-centered, in a strange way the opposite seems to have happened. The ancient world (romantic music begins), it seems, was sensitive to the vastness of forces outside itself -- the music of the spheres, the rotations of the stars -- and if anything it seemed that the earth's uniqueness heightened one's experience of it as a safe haven surrounded by chaos. Whereas in later eras, one sees that the body is less experienced as a home, becomes more interchangeable with other bodies, more difficult even to access and subject to a kind of widespread callousness previously unthinkable (even the Middle Ages' obsession with pain was a reminder of the body's constant, significant presence).