Leonardo and Anatomy

kmiskovi
May 20, 2022
4 min read

Leonardo Da Vinci’s start in anatomy came from an interest in understanding the human body as thoroughly as he could in order to make his paintings and statues as humanlike as possible. Leonardo and other contemporaries of his time thought that if you knew what the body looked like on the inside, you would be able to portray it more accurately on the outside; that knowing the bones, ligaments, tendons, and vessels of the hand allows you to include all those elements in the painting or statue and bring more humanity to your subject (Martin Clayton). Medieval art wasn’t very realistic or three-dimensional, so this transformation in the Renaissance to more anatomically realistic art connects to Leonardo’s intense study of the human form. This transformation in art connects with so many other transformations that happened in the Renaissance, including the gradual shift away from religion. Leonardo believed in the godly creation of humans but looked at it through the lens of science rather than through religion. Leonardo was interested in how the body kept itself alive, which led to him studying the physiology of the body as well, which was a revolutionary idea at the time (Walter Issacson).

Leonardo learned much of what he knew from dissections. According to his own count, Leonardo dissected over thirty human cadavers in his lifetime (Ludwig Haydenreich). Leonardo was an illegitimate child, so having no credibility of his own he would have started dissecting executed criminals and animals. Later in his life, as he became known as a talented anatomist, hospitals donated cadavers, even that of a two-year-old toddler that had no known family and an old man that was dying (Clayton). Little was known about his methods of dissection. His drawings were not made while he did the dissections: the methods of dissection were far too messy at the time, and the papers would have gotten covered in viscera. Or perhaps he did take notes while doing the dissections and redid the drawings later in a cleaner environment. Either way, the drawings look very polished, drawn in pen and ink with the charcoal sketches underneath erased (Clayton). These drawings were clearly meant to be shown to the public at some point, but never were.

Throughout his life, and especially in his later years, Leonardo intended on publishing all his work in a treatise, or a formal and systematically written work about a subject. He had ideas about the exact layout of how he wanted this book written that never came to light. When Marcantonio della Torre, one of the professors of anatomy that Leonardo was working with, died in 1511, his hope of finishing his treatise died as well. (Clayton). In the last 5 years of his life he didn’t do any anatomy work at all. At his death he left all of his work to Francesco Melzi, an Italian painter, who tried but couldn’t make order of all of Leonardo’s thousands of pages. After Melzi’s death, all of Leonardo’s anatomy work lay as loose sheets for centuries. (Issacson). Some of his discoveries were so revolutionary in the Renaissance that even when they were rediscovered, no one believed him. It took until the 1960s until Leonardo’s diagram of the heart was proven correct. (Issacson). He was also the first to note that the heart was the center of the circulatory system, rather than the liver as they thought before. These ideas would have changed the world had they been published.

However, it is important to note that though he made many great strides in the field of anatomy, he wasn’t perfect. He didn’t have a female to dissect, so his diagrams of the uterus came from a cow (Issacson). In fact, he thought that men were all anatomically identical to each other, and to women as well, besides the reproductive system. He was much more willing to show differences in horse anatomy, which he studied extensively when he was commissioned to make the largest horse statue to date (fig. 1). He knew that different breeds of horses had different proportions, but not willing to admit to any differences in humans due to Vitruvius’s idea of the divine proportion of man (Clayton).

Although most of his work was never published at the time, da Vinci made some of the greatest leaps in the study of anatomy since the beginning of the science. Much of this is from the unique viewpoints that Leonardo gave his drawings based on his other disciplines. For example, he took ideas from architecture such as showing a structure from many angles, rather than just one (fig. 2). He also took ideas from engineering, such as showing an exploded view of all the elements, pulled apart to show how they connect, and how they fit together to move as one unit (fig. 3). Then he would take all these different elements and combine them into one wholistic diagram to give a very complete view of the structure he was drawing (fig. 4 and 5). In this way he brought an entirely new perspective to anatomy that hadn’t been seen before (Clayton). Though his work was never published, that doesn’t take away from his genius, and to this day he is one of the greatest anatomists to have ever lived.

fig. 1