Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Leonardo was renowned in his lifetime as a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, and cartographer, but the degree of awareness of his anatomical work among his contemporaries is a mystery. Almost everything that we know today about his researches is contained in 200 sheets of drawings and notes housed in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.
As a young artist in Florence, Leonardo absorbed the prevailing theoretical interest in a quasi-scientific basis for painting. This included the study of superficial anatomy, through life drawing and attendance at the public dissections that were occasionally held by the medical schools. There is no evidence that he was interested in deep anatomy until the late 1480s, by which time he had moved to Milan. There he outlined a plan for a treatise on the human body, covering not only anatomy but also conception, growth, proportion, the emotions, and the senses. A number of sheets from around this date comprise syntheses of animal dissection, surface observation, and traditional beliefs, though Leonardo does not seem to have pursued his studies systematically. He reportedly compiled a manuscript treatise on the anatomy of the horse, now lost; his human material was primarily skeletal, most notably a series of highly accurate drawings of the skull, sectioned in an attempt to locate the sites of the mental faculties.
Due to other obligations, Leonardo's anatomical work ceased from about 1493 till around 1504, when in connection with the abortive
Battle of Anghiari mural in Florence he systematically surveyed the superficial aspects of man. An interest in hydrodynamics soon led him back to a study of the deeper systems of the body, for he now had some access to corpses in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. In the winter of 1507–8, Leonardo was present at the peaceful demise of an elderly man, prompting him to perform an autopsy ‘to see the cause of so sweet a death’. The resulting drawings and notes include the first records of the appendix, cirrhosis of the liver, arteriosclerosis, calcification of vessels, and coronary vascular occlusion. He also returned briefly to an investigation of the structure of the brain, making a wax cast of an ox's ventricles.
Shortly afterwards Leonardo's interests changed fundamentally. A beautiful and highly accurate series of drawings, datable to the winter of 1510–11, concentrate on the mechanics of the osteological and myological systems. His methods of illustration were particularly inventive: the bones of the thorax drawn orthographically; the cervical vertebrae in an exploded view; the hand through six stages of dissection; the shoulder muscles reduced to lines of force to depict the whole system in a single drawing; the arm in seven views through 180 degrees; and so on.
This change in approach seems to have been due to a collaboration with Marcantonio della Torre, the young Galenist and professor of anatomy at the university of Pavia. Leonardo now had much greater access to human material: the number of dissections he claimed to have performed grows from ‘more than ten’ around 1509, to ‘more than thirty’ towards the end of his life. This was the only phase of his researches when he achieved a working compromise between coverage and detail, for it was still his intention to publish a treatise, and, after Marcantonio's death in 1511, Leonardo concentrated primarily on cardiology and embryology.
Leonardo dissected a fetus of about six months, studying the relative sizes of the viscera, though his understanding of the structure of the human placenta was coloured by observations made in an earlier dissection of a gravid cow. More rewarding was his work on the bovine heart. He identified the auricles and described the movements of diastole and systole; he constructed a glass model of the aortic valve and, observing the vortices in the sinuses, he correctly deduced the exact mechanism of closure of the valves. Leonardo was on the verge of discovering the circulation of the blood, but he could not abandon the ancient belief in the independence of the arterial and venous systems, and he modified his results to accommodate this.
In late 1513, Leonardo moved to Rome, where he conducted research in the Ospedale di Santo Spirito, though few resulting drawings can be identified. In 1515 he was accused before Pope Leo X of unspecified sacrilegious practices and was barred from the Ospedale. The following year he went to France, dying there without resuming his anatomical work, and without having completed the treatise that he had planned for thirty years. Leonardo's papers passed to a pupil, Francesco Melzi, at whose villa near Milan they were occasionally seen by visitors, but they were not widely known until the publication of a series of facsimiles around 1900.
Martin Clayton
Bibliography
Keele, K. and and Pedretti, C. (1979). Corpus of the Anatomical Studies in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen at Windsor Castle. Johnson Reprint Co., London and New York.
O'Malley, C. D. and and Saunders, J. (1952). Leonardo da Vinci on the human body. H. Schuman, New York.
See also
anatomy;
dissection.
