Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist
Film script
This is Windsor Castle, home of the Royal Library, which houses the royal
collection of old master drawings. Chief among these is the world’s finest
group of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci – about 600 sheets in all. These
cover every aspect of Leonardo’s work, as a painter, sculptor, architect,
engineer and scientist. And of all his scientific studies, the subject that
engaged Leonardo’s attention most deeply was human anatomy.
Working in the years around 1500, Leonardo dissected about thirty human
corpses and many more animals – human dissection was not banned by the
Church, as is sometimes supposed. He recorded his findings on the pages of
his notebooks, in drawings of amazing beauty and clarity. These were
annotated in Leonardo’s habitual mirror-writing, from right to left, with every
letter in perfect mirror image. Leonardo was left handed, and he presumably
found it easier to write in this way. Certainly it was not an attempt to keep his
work secret, for Leonardo aimed to publish his researches in an illustrated
treatise. Had he done so, he would have transformed European
understanding of human anatomy. But at his death, his studies remained
unpublished among his private papers.
Leonardo’s anatomical work falls into two distinct periods. In the 1480s, when
he was in his thirties, he had little access to human material. With the
exception of these astonishingly detailed studies of a skull, most of his
drawings were based on animal dissection, or ancient theories. This diagram
of the head, for example, records the belief that within the brain are three
bulbous cavities that house the mental faculties, such as reasoning and
memory.
During Leonardo’s second period of study, around 1510, he was allowed to
dissect human bodies in medical schools and monastery hospitals. He
performed a post-mortem on an old man in a hospital in Florence, and
conducted a thorough exploration of his internal organs. Soon afterwards
Leonardo was working in collaboration with the professor of anatomy at the
University of Pavia, and dissected many corpses to make a comprehensive
survey of the bones and muscles. In sheet after sheet Leonardo drew
structures that were not to be described again for centuries.
But Leonardo’s perfectionism and simple bad luck meant that he never
completed his studies. After his death all his anatomical papers were bound
together in this album, which entered the Royal Collection in the seventeenth
century; and they were finally published and understood only in the twentieth
century.
This is the largest ever exhibition of Leonardo’s anatomical work. We hope
you enjoy following the researches of one of the greatest scientists in history.