![]() ![]() This was especially the case with the work of Galen of Pergamon (129 to 199 A.D.), whose doctrines went unchallenged back then. In his day, he was considered to be a man without a classical education, which made it much more difficult for him to gain access to the academic world. After all, it must be borne in mind that Leonardo was self-taught in this area, and could read neither Latin nor Greek. In the beginning, his investigations into traditional medical knowledge played an important role, at least as far as he was able to tap into such information. The artist had turned his attention to anatomy as early as 1487 in Milan – something that would occupy him for the rest of his life. Leonardo was at the height of his anatomical research when he met della Torre in Pavia around 1510. And in this he found marvelous aid in the brain, work and hand of Leonardo, who made a sketchbook with drawings in red chalk retouched in pen and ink: the bodies that he dissected with his own hand were drawn with the greatest diligence.” According to Vasari, “he was one of the first that began to illustrate the problems of medicine with the doctrine of Galen, and to throw true light on anatomy, which up to that time had been veiled in the thick and gross shadow of ignorance. Giorgio Vasari (1511 to 1574), who paid tribute to numerous Renaissance artists with comprehensive biographies, also turned his attention to Leonardo’s anatomical studies and shed light on his association with the physician and anatomy professor Marcantonio della Torre (1481 to 1511). In short, it can be said that the anatomical studies have since been well researched.īut perhaps it was just that that motivated Alessandro Nova, Director at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz since 2006, to take a fresh look at the drawings, not so much by examining their results, but by pursuing the question of what role the process of drawing, the genuine artistic act, played in the generation of scientific knowledge. The extensive inventory of drawings has also been philologically classified and sub-divided into anatomical units such as skeletal system, musculature, nervous system and circulatory system, as well as into today’s established systems, which had not yet been identified in Leonardo’s day. Medical-historical research has already extensively compared the knowledge that Leonardo garnered in his day with that of today’s anatomical information, just as his specific morphological and physiological discoveries have long been fully appreciated. Yet it is important to note that Leonardo was a pioneer in this area and wasn’t able to refer to anything even approximating such graphic visualizations of the inner workings of the human body. The depictions seem all too familiar, hardly deviating from the way we see things today. © Royal Collection Trust / Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013Īnyone who examines Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings will probably first ask themselves to what extent the detailed studies correlate to today’s state of medical knowledge. ![]()
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