Drawing
C.A. 1490
Source: Academies of Venice
The June 2024 Art In Medicine topic is about Da Vinci's Anatomical Drawings.
Lucinda Bennett, the Medical Librarian at Ascension St Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, MD, publishes a regular series on Art in Medicine and The Health Humanities.It's only 1-2 pages with gorgeous images, so it won't take you long to read ... and just might enrich your life.
Da Vinci’s Anatomical Drawings
Among the great minds of the European Renaissance, one stands out as quite possibly the most influential of the era - Leonardo Da Vinci. His name has become synonymous with the term ‘Renaissance Man’, being someone who masters a plethora of skills and disciplines. In the art world, Da Vinci is known for his paintings, usually portraits, and their impact on the visual medium. However, he is also revered in the realm of engineering for his many experiments with machinery, as well as in architecture for his designs in grand structures.
Within the field of medicine, he is known for his many anatomical drawings, which were never published within his lifetime. In fact, these momentous images were not fully appreciated until centuries after his death. As a student of the visual arts, the study of the human form was incredibly important, and was often undertaken illegally via cadaver dissection. “Although the date of Leonardo’s initial involvement with anatomical study is not known, it is sound to speculate that his anatomical interest was sparked during his apprenticeship in Verrocchio’s workshop, either in response to his master’s interest or to that of Verrocchio’s neighbor Pollaiuolo, who was renowned for his fascination with the workings of the human body. It cannot be determined exactly when Leonardo began to perform dissections, but it might have been several years after he first moved to Milan, at the time a centre of medical investigation.” (Encyclopedia Britannica) Some scholars have estimated, based upon the artist’s
own writings, that Leonardo must have conducted dissections upon thirty or so bodies. The practice of a medical or artistic student practicing dissection was not new in the Renaissance, in fact it goes quite far back into history and bodies were acquired through various means. “Though human dissections date back to about the third century BCE, the first recorded public dissection took place around 1315, when Italian physician and anatomist Mondino de Luzzi performed a dissection on an executed criminal. For centuries, laws in Europe and the United States allowed dissections of executed criminals. However, da Vinci was able to procure bodies from hospitals across Italy. In Florence, he befriended a centenarian who he then witnessed peacefully pass away.” (PBS)
So, how many drawings did Leonardo make in his lifetime? Eventually there came enough pages to fill two volumes of anatomical images, compiled over the course of twenty or so years in between other projects. “Leonardo’s interest in anatomy began when he was working for Ludovico in Milan. “On the 2nd day of April 1489”, as he wrote at the head of a page in a new notebook, he sat down to begin his “Book entitled On the Human Figure.” After executing a sequence of stunning drawings of a skull, though, his studies went into abeyance, probably because he lacked access to corpses that he could dissect. But his ambitions to publish a comprehensive treatise on human anatomy persisted – and around two decades later, he returned to his otherwise unused notebook...In it he made a number of pen-and-ink drawings recording his observations while dissecting an old man who had died in a hospital in Florence in the winter of 1507-08...In the winter of 1510-11, while probably collaborating with a young professor of anatomy called Marcantonio della Torre at the University of Pavia, Leonardo compiled a series of 18 mostly double-sided sheets exploding with more than 240 individual drawings and over 13,000 words of notes.” (BBC)
Now, we must ask ourselves, just how accurate are these drawings? Being made from life does lend credence to anatomical accuracy, but not every image is now considered absolutely correct. A lack of access to female specimens does present inconsistencies in Da Vinci’s, as stated in an interview with a Professor Peter Abrahams in the BBC News on the topic: “According to Prof Abrahams the upper half of the drawing of a torso is a fairly accurate observation of the body. The liver, for example, is correctly placed not far below the woman's right breast. Its size suggests that the woman may have suffered from liver disease. The problems with the image start lower down, however...the uterus is wrong. This image, he suggests, is reminiscent of what we see in animals such as cows. It is possible that given the difficulty of getting hold of female corpses, Leonardo used the knowledge that he had gained from dissecting animals to help him understand the human body.” However, in the renditions of the spine and heart, Leonardo is remarkable in his ability to replicate and correctly deduce the working functions of these organs and bones. Had his work been published during his own lifetime, the correct workings of the human heart (being a four-chambered organ which cycled in a specific manner) would have been known centuries before modern medicine correctly discovered it. And it was his training in a seemingly unrelated field which assisted in his theory on the correct working of the human body - that of architecture and machinery. According to Peter Abrahams, Leonardo perfectly captured the delicate curve and tilt of the spine, and the snug fit of one vertebra into another. “Professor Abrahams suggests that it was Leonardo's skill as an architect and engineer that gave him the insight in to how the body actually works.”
References:
Anatomical studies and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
“The bones, muscles and tendons of the hand”
Black chalk, pen and ink, wash on paper
C.A. 1510 - 11
Credit: Royal Collection Trust
References:
Anatomical studies and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
Reprinted with the generous permission of Ms. Bennett.
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