Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is
undoubtedly remembered foremost as a gifted and talented artist, yet nowadays
he is perhaps becoming increasingly well known as the archetypal ‘Renaissance
Man,’ whose interests and exploits were not simply confined to our more
specialised notions of what defines an artist. Certainly, a proliferation of
books and exhibitions over recent years has increasingly focussed on redefining
him as Leonardo, the scientist.
Leonardo was indeed a polymath,
equally as interested in art as he was in tackling problems of engineering,
optics, geology, hydrodynamics, biology, philosophy, architecture, medicine,
arithmetic – the list goes on. Indeed, Leonardo saw all these subjects as
essentially one and the same. They were all interconnected. It seems only
logical that an artist wishing to create enormous sculptures should concern
himself with fundamental principles of engineering; likewise, an artist who is
seeking to accurately portray the human body in action with convincing emotional
expressions would do well to study basic human anatomy. In the last hundred
years or so, scholars have been looking at Leonardo’s notebooks and finding in
them a window into his remarkable mind.
Sifting through his extant
manuscript sheets and the pages of his surviving notebooks (only a bare
fraction of what he is thought to have created during his life) we encounter
Leonardo first-hand. The writer, Charles Nicholl has written a wonderfully
evocative and well-informed biography, titled Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind (Allen Lane, 2004). And,
in an equally engaging and fond essay on the notebooks, Nicholl sums up
Leonardo’s style of writing: “[H]e is not
a writer in a literary sense. Rather, he is a writer-down of things: a recorder
of observations, a pursuer of data, an explorer of thoughts, an inscriber of
lists and memoranda … In painting he is a master of nuance, but as a penman he
tends to the workmanlike. At its best his writing has a marvellous uncluttered
clarity … There are many beautiful sentences in the notebooks … The words are
pared back to the quick; it is a statement of lucid simplicity into which
complex scientific questions are folded.” – see: Charles Nicholl, Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations (Allen
Lane, 2011).
But for Leonardo the words were far
less important than the sketches to which they were appended. For instance,
next to one of his anatomical studies of a heart we find the accompanying
passage: “O writer, what words of yours
could describe this whole organism as perfectly as this drawing does? Because
you have no true knowledge of it you write confusedly, and convey little
understanding of the true form of things … How could you describe this heart in
words without filling a whole book? And the more minutely you try to write of
it the more you confuse the mind of the listener.” These words could well
have been intended as an admonishment to their author just as much as any other
unnamed writer, especially when we see Leonardo getting lost in his own ever
more minute descriptions of the workings of the heart at the end of his long
years of in-depth anatomical study (given up, poised on the cusp of
‘demonstrating’ the correct system of circulation). These words serve to remind
us that Leonardo was for the most part not writing for us; primarily he was writing
for himself, whilst aiming towards a final publication that never came to be.
As with all such notebooks belonging to artists and scientists alike – they were
working notebooks: repositories for ever evolving thoughts and ideas, where
facts were weighed and sifted, processes experimented with and refined – they
were active works in progress; their contents remain frozen in time, rare
survivals for us to review and speculate over with fascination.
My own fascination with Leonardo da
Vinci began when I was around the age of 11 or 12 years old. I was taken to see
an exhibition of Leonardo’s drawings held at the Hayward Gallery on London’s
Southbank. I vividly recall staring at Leonardo’s plans for an amoured tank,
looking like a wooden ‘B-Movie style’ flying-saucer, bristling with cannon.
There was also a life-size model of his famous flying machine, a huge wooden
contraption which he intended would give a person wings, like those of an angel;
yet its design remained impractically doomed, like the mythical Icarus himself.
This exhibition had certainly fired my imagination, and spurred on by school
science lessons, in which we dissected sheep hearts and pig’s lungs (I remember
my teacher daring me to be the first to poke my little finger down the open
aorta, which I intrepidly did much to the shocked-mirth of my classmates!); so
much so that I bought myself a hard-backed notebook, like Leonardo’s, and,
using my mother’s old book of Basic
Anatomy and Physiology by C.F.V. Smout (Edward Arnold, 1967) originally
bought for her nursing studies as my primer, I set about creating my own meticulously
detailed medical drawings.
Originally I was intrigued by the
workings of the human body, but the blood and guts side of it all began to get
the better of me and I found myself honing in on one particular area, namely
the structure of bones and the mechanics of how they worked. As I progressed
through school my squeamish side eventually won out altogether and other
subjects eventually superseded and took precedence. But, unwittingly my budding
Leonardo phase was to stand me in good stead, as many years later I found a
basic understanding of skeletal structures came in handy when working on
archaeological excavations. Although I’ve never actually excavated a human
skeleton myself (I did once excavate a headless dog’s skeleton!), I have worked
with human remains in museums. Some ten years ago now, my mother’s copy of
Smout’s Basic Anatomy and Physiology (which
I still have) was utilised once again when I was charged with recreating an
accurate display of the burial of a Bronze Age archer. In the course of which I
discovered he had several fused vertebra in his neck and lower back. It was a
fascinating task and taught me that my love of all things Leonardo-like had
never really died!
Leonardo begins from the basis of
received knowledge, theories as to the workings of the body and the essential
emanation of life, handed down from classical authors; but through the process
of genuine scientific study he starts to move away from supposition and begins
to root his knowledge in grounded facts – trusting what he sees and what he can
prove (through experiment and simulation) over what he originally believes. For
instance, in an early drawing dated around 1490-1492, he depicts two channels
in the penis, which he believes are necessary for the transmission of the vital
elements (animal, spiritual, and material) during reproduction, which he subsequently
draws correctly as a single channel in a later and more detailed study of
around 1508. Likewise, he also refines certain concepts, adapting them to the
reality of what he finds in the course of his dissections. Again in 1490-1492
he draws a cross-section of the human head in which he shows three bulbous
‘ventricles’ in the brain, each neatly lined up one after another; yet by
1508-1509 he has conducted an experiment using a truly innovative method of
dissecting the brain (having first injected it with molten wax to better
preserve the shape of such internal cavities) and thereby finding a much more
complex form of arrangement for these cavities.
However, not even Leonardo’s
meticulous rigour could wholly avoid some degree of conjecture. Whilst we know
he was able to dissect a number of human bodies he was also compelled at times
to supplement gaps in his investigations by making extrapolations from animal
corpses which could differ subtly from the same organs as found in humans. In
his famous diagram of a child in utero
(which it seems likely from other details he did actually see directly for
himself), he has added specific features to the make-up of the wall of the womb
which are found in cows rather than humans.
Leonardo’s anatomical investigations
come to an end with detailed investigations into the working system of the
heart. Based on the dissection of ox hearts he accurately draws the chambers of
the heart and its valves, and he is the first not simply to note the existence
of what has since been named as the sinus
of Valsalva, but also the first to demonstrate what its actual function is.
He did this by making an accurate glass model of the aortic valve, through
which he pumped water containing grass seeds, and this showed him the vortices
in the flow. He concluded that these vortices were instrumental in closing the
valve – a finding which wasn’t confirmed until 1912, exactly four hundred years
later.
These drawings show but one facet
of Leonardo’s brilliant and seemingly fathomless mind. And we are left at the
close of the exhibition pondering what might have been had Leonardo been able
to pursue his investigations to the end of his aims and publish a treatise
which would certainly have significantly advanced the progress of medical science
at the time. Instead, they languished largely unknown and certainly
unappreciated for centuries. Like the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria who
invented the basic apparatus of a steam engine but never managed to take that next step and
channel its actual power, history it seems is full of ‘nearlies’ and ‘what
might have beens.’ Who knows, perhaps if I’d studied harder at my Da Vinci and
my Smout drawings I might have become a high-flying heart surgeon … or a half decent
high street butcher!
This is a truly excellent
exhibition, well worth a few hours of your time. For more information see the
following article: Leonardo’s AnatomyYears (Nature, Vol. 484, 19 April 2012) by Martin Clayton, Senior Curator
of Prints and Drawings at The Royal Library, Windsor Castle, and curator of
this exhibition.
Many of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical studies can be seen in more detail on-line at the Royal Collection's website. For more information about visiting the exhibition click on the image below.
Many of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical studies can be seen in more detail on-line at the Royal Collection's website. For more information about visiting the exhibition click on the image below.
Thank you – I was impressed by your command of detail and the reality of the object.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I'm glad my piece was of interest.
ReplyDeleteReading your own blog articles on the exhibtion, noting your point on the commercial intent of Leonardo's anatomical sketches, and having just listened to today's "In Our Time" programme (BBC Radio 4) on William Caxton (c.1415/22-1492), I was struck by a throw away thought concerning Leonardo's use of mirror script. People speculate that this may have been for secrecy or simply a quirk of his 'unlettered' self-education, but either way I expect it would have been welcomed as a boon by any compositor if he'd ever submitted a final manuscript to a printer such as Caxton!
Like you, I was also impressed by the realism of his drawings - in several of them you can clearly see the likeness of the old man whose corpse he dissected recognisably rendered as of the same individual from one sheet to the next. I suppose this is in part the root of the drawings seen as "art" rather than simply as mechanical diagrams.