The miraculous Dr da Vinci: An artistic genius, yes. But a new exhibition proves Leonardo was also a pioneering anatomist whose discoveries 500 years ago are still used in hospitals today
His contemporaries called it 'inhuman and disgusting work'. Leonardo himself admitted you had to have the stomach for it, and that you might be 'impeded by the fear of living through the night in the company of quartered and flayed corpses, fearful to behold'.
It was certainly a messy process, far removed from the dissection of embalmed bodies with precise surgical instruments as practised by medical students today. You had to work at speed, for the corpses were often in an advanced state of decomposition. The tools were rudimentary at best.
Leonardo listed among his instruments a fine-tooth bone saw, surgical knife, forceps and scalpels, and he left behind drawings of other knives he used, with sharp, hooked blades that would not look out of place in a torturer's tool kit.
Scroll down for video
Among the 24 sketches never before seen included a detailed study of the right ventricle and valves of the heart
A closer examination of the right ventricle and tricuspid valve, left, and far right, Da Vinci pens his analysis of the movement inside the heart
Da Vanci explores the vessels of the neck and shoulder, left, and right, the bones and muscles of the shoulder
Yet such was his fascination with the human body, his almost messianic determination to peer into our souls, that he indulged in this 'inhuman' work for years on end, becoming one of the greatest students of anatomy who ever lived.
Leonardo was a genius as an artist, but his scientific studies were at least as important to him as his art. And he made discoveries about the human body that would be confirmed by medical research only in the late 20th century.
A truly mind-boggling new exhibition
at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, spreads out before us the
evidence of his scientific brilliance in the form of his drawings of
human and animal anatomy.
The drawings have been owned by the Royal Family since the 17th century, and to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, they will be exhibited in the biggest show ever of Leonardo's anatomical achievement.
It not only heightens our sense of his greatness, but also increases the awe that must possess any thinking being when contemplating the intricacy and oddity of the body.
Leonardo was planning to write a gigantic treatise on human anatomy, but he was never able to finish it.
The brachial plexus, and umbilical vessels, left, and right, the veins of the pelvic and lumbar region
The brachial plexus, left, and right, Da Vinci explores the thetrachea, stomach and right vagus nerve
Leonardo Da Vinci, right, also paid close attention to the abdomen, left, during his extensive analysis of the human anatomy
The exhibition's joint curator, Martin Clayton, a Cambridge-trained scientist and art historian who is senior curator of prints and drawings in the library at Windsor Castle, convinced me there was a reason why Leonardo's treatise was never published — and why his astonishing ability as an anatomist remained unknown for centuries.
It was because Leonardo was wrestling with a central problem of the way our bodies work — and he never cracked it. He couldn't work out how blood circulates in our veins.
This was a failure only as judged by modern medicine, for Leonardo was born the illegitimate son of a peasant girl and a lawyer in 1452 when the accepted view of physiology was very different.
It was because he was barred from the traditional professions by the circumstances of his birth that Leonardo turned to art. Yet from the 1480s onwards, he was deeply involved in his scientific studies.
The availability of human corpses was limited, so he dissected animals to begin with. Monkeys, dogs, pigs, bears, pregnant cows and horses all went under his knife.
So obsessed was he with his anatomical quest that during his last decade, in his 50s and 60s, he seems not to have embarked on any new paintings at all and worked essentially as a scientist.
By then, he was so well respected that he was able to obtain more human bodies. In all, he dissected 30 corpses, going to hospitals for the dead.
There are glimpses in his notes of the gruelling nature of his work. At one point, he reminds himself to 'break the jaw from the side so you can see the uvula [the projection of the soft palate between the tonsils] in its position'.
The muscles of the trunk and leg, left, and right, the stomach and related structures
The muscles of the legs, left, and right, the male and female reproductive systems, with a detailed breakdown of the individual parts for both men and women
The muscles of the leg, right, and left, a close look at the individual nerves inside the leg
On another occasion he wrote: 'To obtain a true and full knowledge, I have dissected more than ten bodies, destroying all other organs and taking away in its minutest particles all the flesh that was to be found around the [blood] vessels without causing them to bleed.
'And one single body was not sufficient for enough time, so that it was necessary to proceed little by little with as many bodies as would render a complete knowledge. This I repeated twice.'
In the final room of the exhibition, you can almost see the frenzied Leonardo grappling with the problem of how the blood enters and leaves the heart. He could see the heart was a pump, with the blood flowing in and out of it.
Leonardo even solved the problem of how this can happen without the heart filling up and drowning in its own blood. He drew, and dissected, the aortic valve, which regulated the flow. He filled the aortic valve with wax so as to be able to examine it in detail and to recognise its functions.
It was only in the late 20th century that MRI scans could show how the aortic valve actually worked.
Leonardo, doing drawings during the early years of Henry VIII, had already worked it out, but because he could not fill in the whole jigsaw puzzle, this perfectionist would not, could not, complete his treatise.
One of the many corpses that he dissected was that of an old man — said to have been 100 years old when he died in 1507.
Renaissance men and women were vague about ages and the old boy cannot really have been as ancient as that, as Leonardo's detailed drawings depict. The muscles are those of an active 60-year old.
The cardiovascular system and principal organs of a woman, right, and left, extracts from The Centenarian, Anatomical Manuscript B that Da Vinci penned
The contents of the topics to be investigated in the manuscript that has gone on display, and right, miscellaneous notes and anatomical sketches
Amongst his studies he also investigated the thoracic and abdominal cavities of an ox, left, and right, the blood supply of a foetal calf
But in his autopsy on the 'old man', Leonardo established certain phenomena that we associate with much later medical knowledge. For example, he sees that the old man's arteries have hardened. There is a coronary blockage — the first time this had ever been depicted.
The old man also had cirrhosis of the liver. We always used to believe this was caused by the effect of alcohol on the liver, but Leonardo believed it was caused by malnutrition. Medical opinion has swung in his favour — drunks neglect themselves and do not eat properly.
This exhibition shows how firm was Leonardo's hand, how sharp his eye, how extraordinarily detailed his level of skills.
Each drawing is made up of the finest line-shading. The tiny mirror writing in which he made all his observations shows no blot. And some of the experiments he records suggest preternatural delicacy of touch — for example, he anatomises the muscles in the face.
Any of us with training could slice flesh from bone. But the facial muscles are within soft flesh, and to have separated them out and drawn them with the accuracy and delicacy displayed is almost miraculous.
Incidentally, there are many drawings on display where modern medical professors would not alter a line. In fact, Professor Gus McGrouther, Professor of Plastic and Reconstruction Surgery at Manchester University, told the curator he displays Leonardo's drawings of the human hand in his teaching room and uses them to instruct his anatomy students.
Lord Winston, an expert on human reproductive processes, examined Leonardo's drawing of that 100-year-old's genitalia and bladder and, again, found them to be all but perfect.
One of Da VInci's more well-known anatomical drawings, 'The Foetus in the Womb'
The Leonardo Da Vinci: Anatomist exhibition at The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, runs until October
There is a good display room in the exhibition in which modern models, used for teaching purposes, are displayed beside Leonardo's drawings. The closeness, for example, between his drawing of the brain and the model in the exhibition of cerebral ventricles is uncanny.
Of course, Leonardo was a man of his time who got things wrong and was possessed by fixed ideas. It was not just that he could not fathom the circulation of the blood.
His examination of the female reproductive system was based on cows, not women, so the ovaries and Fallopian tubes are in the wrong position.
He believed semen was from the base of the spine and his drawing of a couple copulating link the testicles to the heart (the seat of the emotions) by a series of Heath Robinson-like tubes that do not exist.
He could not get out of his head the (false) pictures of human anatomy fed to him by the classical medical thinkers Galen and Aristotle.
Like them, he believed the heart was a source of heat and 'vital spirit' and that the lungs existed to prevent the heart over-heating.
And it is surely revealing that the two most famous of his anatomical drawings are not based on observation, but on theory. The perfectly symmetrical man, whose outsplayed legs and arms fit into a perfect circle, never existed. If our proportions were that of da Vinci's 'perfect' man, we'd look like a circus freak.
And the baby foetus curled up in the womb is enclosed in a cow's womb and is partly an idealised picture of a new-born child.
He can't stop thinking of the foetus as a person, just as all the old corpses he is cutting up remain, for him, human. That is what is interesting about them, for him and for us.
What interested Leonardo was the phenomenon of humanity itself. He was interested not simply in bodily functions, but in what makes us who we are. His attention to the details of the body never for an instant cease to be expressions of wonder at the miracle of human life.
And that is why this exhibition is so uplifting, so mysterious, so joyous.
* Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, from Friday until October 7, 2012. To book tickets, go to www.royalcollection.org.uk
Queen's Gallery worker Rachel Woollen adjusts 'The Foetus in the Womb', one of Leonardo da Vinci's studies of the human body, during a preview of the upcoming exhibition
The Royal Collection boasts the largest compendium of Leonardo drawings in the world, some 600 in all, of which 268 are anatomical sketches
Most watched News videos
We are no longer accepting comments on this article.