Biographies & Memoirs

The Anatomist

The earliest datable signs of Leonardo’s interest in anatomy – the first drawings, the first purposeful notes – belong to the late 1480s. These are the outset of one of his most profound achievements. In terms of what he actually contributed – of the difference he made – his work as an anatomist is far more significant than his work as an engineer, or inventor, or architect. He mapped and documented the human body more rigorously and specifically than had been done before; his anatomical drawings constituted a new visual language for describing body-parts, as his mechanical drawings did for machines. There is a certain dogged courage in these investigations, which were beset by taboos and doctrinal doubts, and which depended on the stressful and repulsive procedures of post-mortem examination in pre-refrigeration circumstances. Leonardo’s anatomy exemplifies his belief in practical, empirical, hands-on investigation: a probing and revaluing of the received wisdom of the ancients – Galen, Hippocrates, Aristotle – who were still the mainstay of the ‘medical schools’.

The orthodox felt that anatomy was a curiosity too far: man was made in God’s image, and should not be stripped down like a piece of machinery. Anatomy reveals what ‘Nature has carefully concealed’, wrote the early humanist Colluccio Salutati, ‘and I do not see how the caverns of the body can be viewed without effusion of tears.’ At least once Leonardo’s activities brought him into confrontation with the Church: in Rome in 1515 an ill-wisher ‘hindered me in anatomy, denouncing it before the Pope and also at the hospital’.100

Leonardo’s anatomical studies belong under the heading ‘Leonardo the scientist’, but are also vitally connected with Leonardo the artist: they bridge the gap between those roles, or show that it is not really a gap at all. Anatomy was one of the building-blocks of painting, like geometry and mathematics. Beneath an anatomical drawing showing the nerves of the neck and shoulders Leonardo writes, ‘This demonstration is as necessary to good draughtsmen as is the origin of words from Latin to good grammarians.’101One thinks of the Last Supper with its taut, twisting, tensing neck-muscles expressing the drama of the moment. His interest in anatomy thus arises – like the slightly later interest in optics – as a corollary to his work as a painter, and perhaps more particularly to his role as a teacher of painting to the pupils and apprentices of his Milanese studio. Here dawns the ideal of the ‘painter-philosopher’, whose art is based on a profound scientific knowledge of everything he depicts; here begin the painstaking tracts and treatises later incorporated into his great posthumous handbook, the Trattato della pittura. For the early biographers this programme was a mixed blessing: Giovio had no doubt that Leonardo’s small output as an artist was due to his time-consuming study of the ‘subordinate branches of his art’, chief among them anatomy and optics. Vasari too regarded these investigations as tangential and ultimately debilitating.

Leonardo would probably have studied anatomy under Verrocchio. The Florentine figurative style of the 1470s – Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s paintings, Verrocchio’s sculptures – was strong on anatomical detail and drama. Pollaiuolo made detailed studies of human musculature, apparently from dissections, before producing the famous Battle of the Nude Men.102 Leonardo would have known of, and perhaps known, the Florentine anatomist Antonio Benivieni, a friend of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Benivieni studied the functions of the heart and other internal organs, but his chief interest was dissecting corpses after execution, looking for anatomical indices of criminal behaviour. His treatise De abditis causis (Of Hidden Causes) reports his findings after twenty such dissections.

There may be other Florentine sources to consider, but it is here in Milan that the interest in anatomy surfaces powerfully. In 1489, in fact, Leonardo was planning a ‘book’ – a manuscript treatise – on the subject. There is written evidence of this: vestigial drafts and contents-lists, one of them dated 2 April 1489. Leonardo later gave this projected book or treatise the title De figura umana (Of the Human Figure), again suggesting the link between anatomy and painting.103

In 1489 the thirty-six-year-old Leonardo contemplated that universal symbol of mortality, a human skull. On three sheets now at Windsor he drew eight studies of the skull – profiles, cross-sections, views at oblique angles from above.104 The drawings are delicate, beautifully shaded and rather eerie. Different studies select different details – one shows the blood-vessels of the face; another shows the relation between the orbit and the maxillary antrum (eye-socket and jawbone); another peers down into the empty cranium and traces the intercranial nerves and vessels. But the chief interest, as shown in the accompanying notes, is less scientific than metaphysical. One of the studies shows the skull squared for proportion, and beside it Leonardo writes, ‘Where the line a–mis intersected by the line c–b, there will be the confluence of all the senses.’

This ‘confluence of the senses’ he is trying to pinpoint is the sensus communis postulated by Aristotle. It was the part of the brain where sensory impressions were coordinated and interpreted. It was described as the most important of the brain’s three ‘ventricles’, the others being the imprensiva, where raw sensory data were gathered, and the memoria, where the processed information was stored. ‘Ventricle’ suggests merely a place or cavity, but the sensus communis was active as well. In a computer analogy it was the CPU or central processing unit: both a physical entity and a metaphysical system. In some notes contemporary with the skull studies, Leonardo defines the classical theory thus:

The common sense is what judges the things given to it by the other senses. The ancient speculators concluded that man’s capacity to interpret is caused by an organ to which the other five senses refer everything… They say that this common sense is situated in the centre of the head between the zones of impression and memory.

The sensus communis was thus the home of reason, imagination, intellect – even the soul. Leonardo again:

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‘The seat of the soul’. Sectional study of a human skull, with measurements to locate the sensus communis.

It seems that the soul resides in this organ… called the Common Sense. It is not spread throughout the body as many have thought, but is entirely in one part, because if it were all-pervading and the same in every part, there would have been no need to make the organs of the senses converge… The Common Sense is the seat of the soul.105

Taking this at face value, one arrives at the extraordinary notion that in the proportional skull study at Windsor, illustrated above, Leonardo furnishes an actual grid-reference for the site of a man’s soul. This would of course be over-literal. Leonardo is inquiring rather than assuming; he refers the theory to ‘ancient speculators’, mainly Aristotle, and he notes the implications it has for other ancient speculations – Platonic, Hermetic – which held the soul to be infused everywhere. None the less this is a typical Leonardian leap – a measure of thrilling investigative potential. It will surely be possible – by the kind of lucid, dispassionate study these drawings exemplify – to find the inner secrets of a man’s mind. If there is a ‘common sense’ we can surely locate it; if there is a soul it surely resides there. One hears him in these notes: at once the magician and the sceptic. He peers fastidiously into the nooks and chambers of the skull, his eye burning with that fierce but ambiguous curiosity in which are commingled ‘fear and desire – fear of that threatening dark cave; desire to see if there was some marvellous thing within’.

On the verso of one of the skull studies he writes the date, 2 April 1489, and then the following list of subjects to be investigated. It begins with questions specific to the head and face, and thus connected to the skull series:

Which tendon causes the motion of the eye, so that the motion of one eye moves the other.

Of frowning.

Of raising and lowering the eyebrows.

Of closing and opening the eyes.

Of flaring the nostrils.

Of opening the lips with the teeth shut.

Of pouting with the lips.

Of laughing.

Of astonishment…

Then suddenly, and typically, the scope of the inquiry broadens, and from the muscular mechanics of laughter and astonishment he turns, with hardly a pause, to

Describe the beginning of man, and what causes it within the womb, and why a child of eight months cannot survive.

What sneezing is.

What yawning is.

Falling sickness

spasm

paralysis

shivering with cold

sweating

hunger

sleep

thirst

lust

He then moves on to the body’s systems of tendons and muscles – ‘Of the tendon which causes movement from the shoulder to the elbow’, and ‘Of the tendon which causes movement of the thigh’, etc. This subject-matter may be related to another early anatomical study, showing the tendons of the arm and leg.106 Its technical deficiencies suggest a drawing done at a dissection, hence rougher and more hurried.

Already in this programme of anatomical studies we sense that urge towards comprehensiveness which becomes a debilitating feature of Leonardo’s scientific investigations: everything must be explained anew, each topic opening up to reveal scores of other topics in need of examination.

Also part of this course of study ‘of the human figure’ is a series of drawings which tabulate the proportions of the human body and establish mathematical ratios between its different parts.107 Here again we find the influence of Vitruvius, the great Roman architect and military engineer of the first century AD, whose writings constitute a unique record of classical theory and practice on the subject of harmonious proportions. There are a number of drawings on this subject at Windsor, dated around 1490, and there are others now lost which are known through copies in the Codex Huygens, a manuscript treatise compiled in the latter half of the sixteenth century, probably by the Milanese artist Girolamo Figino, who was a pupil of Leonardo’s former assistant Francesco Melzi and had access to Melzi’s enormous collection of Leonardo papers.

The most famous of these proportional studies – indeed one of the most famous drawings in the world – is the so-called ‘Vitruvian Man’, or the ‘Homo ad circulum’, which has become a kind of logo for Leonardo and his aspiring mind. Like most very famous works, it is more often looked at in the isolating spotlight of fame than in the context in which it was created.

The Vitruvian Man is a drawing in pen and ink on a large sheet of paper (13½ x 9½ inches) now in the Accademia in Venice.108 Its presence in Venice is probably connected to the printing of Fra Giocondo’s folio edition of the works of Vitruvius, published in Venice in 1511, which contains an engraving based on the drawing. Above and below the drawing are handwritten texts. The upper text begins:

Vitruvius the architect says in his work on architecture that the measurements of man are distributed by Nature as follows: that 4 fingers make one palm, and 4 palms make one foot; 6 palms make a cubit [a forearm, from the Latin cubitus, elbow]; 4 cubits make a man’s height…

These ratios – quoted from the opening of Book 3 of Vitruvius’s De architectura – continue down to the punctilious: ‘from the elbow to the tip of the hand will be the fifth part of a man; from the elbow to the armpit will be the eighth part of a man’, etc. Beneath the drawing is a scale given in units of fingers and palms.

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The Vitruvian Man.

The drawing shows a single man in two distinct positions: these correspond to two sentences in the text. The man who stands with his legs together and his arms out horizontally illustrates the sentence written directly below the drawing: ‘Tanto apre l’omo nelle braccia quanto è la sua altezza’ – in other words, the width of a man’s outspread arms is equal to his height. The man is therefore shown enclosed in a square, each of whose sides measures 96 fingers (or 24 palms). The other figure, with his legs astride and his arms raised higher, expresses a more specialist Vitruvian rule:

If you open your legs so much as to decrease your height by 1/14th, and raise your outspread arms till the tips of your middle fingers are level with the top of your head, you will find that the centre of your outspread limbs will be the navel, and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle.

This man is shown enclosed in a circle of which his navel is the centre.

Part of the drawing’s power is its interplay of abstract geometry and observed physical reality. The body of the man is synoptic but beautifully contoured and muscled. The feet actually seem to be standing on the lower line of the square, or pushing against the hoop of the circle. The double figure introduces a sense of movement which might be a gymnast’s or, indeed, that of a man moving his arms up and down like the wings of a bird. The body is delineated with clean, spare, diagrammatic lines, but the face has been treated rather differently. It is more intensely worked, more dramatically shadowed: it glowers.

I have sometimes wondered if the Vitruvian Man is actually a self-portrait. In a literal sense perhaps not – the drawing is dated c. 1490, and the man looks older than thirty-eight. It is also the case that the face exemplifies proportions listed in the accompanying text – for instance that the distance from the roots of the hair to the eyebrows is equal to the distance from the tip of the chin to the mouth. The features are in this sense ideal or prototypical. And yet the whole idea of the drawing seems to be a physically realistic rendering of these abstract bio-geometrical symmetries, and so the stern-looking man in the circle seems to be someone, rather than a cipher – someone with penetrating, deeply shadowed eyes, and a thick mane of curly hair parted in the middle. At the least I would say that there are elements of self-portraiture in the Vitruvian Man: that this figure which represents natural harmonies also represents the man uniquely capable of understanding them – the artist-anatomist-architect Leonardo da Vinci.

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