Multi-talented Leonardo da Vinci (April 1452-May 1519) is primarily known as a painter, but the new exhibition at the Buckingham Palace of his studies of the human body will show his genius as an human anatomist.
The largest-ever exhibition of Da Vinci’s anatomical work, which takes place almost 500 years after his death, features 87 pages from his notebooks, including 24 sides of previously unexhibited material.
His anatomical studies and drawing were unparalleled as he used the principles of architecture and engineering to make his drawings and observations. From architecture, he took principles of elevation, plan and section and from engineering he took the “exploded view,” pulling elements apart to show how they fit together.
“He intended to publish his ground-breaking work in a treatise on anatomy, and had he done so his discoveries would have transformed European knowledge of the human anatomy,” curator of the exhibition, Martin Clayton said on Monday, just days before the exhibition opens at Buckingham Palace on May 4.
“I want to maybe redress the general impression of Leonardo da Vinci’s work and general activity and his status as one of the great figures of the Renaissance. He has been known as the archetype Renaissance man since his death almost 500 years ago, but people on the whole have seen him primarily as a painter who conducted some scientific researches on the side, almost as some kind of a bizarre hobby. What this exhibition shows is Leonardo actually was primarily a scientist, at least for the last part of his life. He only executed a small number of paintings at the time. In the last 15 years of his life, he didn’t begin any new painting, his assistants were working on paintings and he was much more interested in the sciences. Above all, anatomy fascinated him the most,” he explained.
With the huge amounts of research that Da Vinci undertook in human anatomy, his anatomical studies would have formed the most influential work on the human body ever produced, if they had been published. Some of his findings were not to be repeated for hundreds of years.
“He is better known as a painter than a scientist because he published nothing as a scientist during the course of his life. He died in 1519 with all his papers, all his research still in his possession. He had bequeathed them to his favourite student Francesco Melzi, who took them back to family villa outside Milan. He treasured these for the rest of his life. When he died in 1570, the papers were sold to sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who preserved the notebooks intact and mounted loose drawings into several large albums, including one of the anatomical drawings and studies,” Mr Clayton added.
Da Vinci drawings show he was the first person to accurately depict the spine in the history of Western medicine. He also conducted a post-mortem on 100-year-old man just hours after his death in a hospital in Florence. In his post-mortem examination notes, displayed for the first time, he gave the first descriptions of cirrhosis of the liver and narrowing of the arteries in the history of medicine. During this dissection, he also drew the appendix — in what is thought to be the first depiction or description of this structure in Western medicine.
He carried out approximately 20 autopsies in the medical school of the University of Pavia in collaboration with the professor of anatomy, Marcantonio della Torre, that resulted in 240 individual drawings of astounding clarity and notes running to more than 13,000 words in his distinctive mirror-writing. “This was not an attempt to keep his researches secret, as has been claimed, but probably a simple childhood trick that became a habit,” Mr Clayton said.
Towards the end of his career, he concentrated his studies on the process of reproduction. In a drawing from c.1510-13, he has depicted an opened uterus with a baby in the breech position. His last and greatest anatomical campaign was an investigation of the heart, precisely recording the form of the chambers, valves and coronary vessels and came very close to discovering the circulation of the blood, a century before William Harvey.
In 1543, Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius published his anatomical treatise, De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body), which became the most important work on anatomy ever published. Sadly, Da Vinci’s drawings remained unpublished and were effectively lost to the world until the 20th century.
“If these had been published at roughly the time they were done, they would have knocked Vesalius’ book out of the market and, of course, Vesalius’ Humani Corporis Fabrica is, in 1543, now considered the first major anatomy textbook. But these are actually in quality better, and in design and ability to learn anatomy, far superior than many of Vesalius,” said Prof. Peter Abrahams, an expert in clinical anatomy at Warwick Medical School.
“For me as an anatomist, what Leonardo did was bring all his disciplines of architecture, geometry, engineering and combine it with an art expression that was quite unique. He put all of these together to try and explain not only how things looked but how things worked, and in that he was certainly unique. If you were to take 10 specialists in the fields of which he worked, geometry, anatomy, physiology, engineering, architecture, I doubt if ten professors in those fields would have the knowledge base and talents that Leonardo had.”
Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist, The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, May 4-Oct. 7, 2012