Litigations, transcriptions, cases, letters: Leonardo’s life in the early months of 1508 – the last he would spend in Florence, as it turned out – seems oddly scribal, one might even say notarial. The stacks of paper in his studiolo on Via Larga threaten to dwarf him as he sits writing. His shoulders are getting rounder; his eyesight is troubling him; his beard is flecked with grey. There is some artistic activity of which we know next to nothing: the mysterious ‘two Madonnas of different sizes’ for King Louis; the eternally ongoingMona Lisa; the advisory work on Rustici’s sculptural group for the Baptistery; and perhaps some last touches to the giant fragment of the Battle of Anghiari, though there is no documentation of this, nor of his relations – if any – with the Gonfalonier. Leonardo abandoned relationships as easily as he abandoned pictures – a skill, the psychiatrist might say, which he learned early on from his father.
But perhaps the most significant activity of these last months in Florence – the activity that opens a new chapter of intensely focused investigation – finds him with not a pen or a paintbrush in his hand but a scalpel. In a famous memorandum of late 1507 or early 1508 Leonardo records his dissection of the corpse of an old man:
This old man, a few hours before his death, told me he had lived for more than a hundred years, and that he was conscious of no deficiency in his person other than feebleness. And thus, sitting on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, without any movement or sign of distress, he passed from this life. And I made an anatomy to see the cause of a death so sweet.
He also, at around the same time, dissected the body of a two-year-old child, ‘in which I found everything to be the opposite to that of the old man’.38
His immediate interest centres on the vascular system. Next to a drawing showing the superficial veins of the arm, he notes the difference between the veins and arteries of the ‘old man’ and the ‘boy’. He suspects that the old man’s death was attributable to ‘weakness caused by a lack of blood in the artery which feeds the heart and lower members’. He finds the arteries to be ‘very dry, thin and withered’, and ‘in addition to the thickening of their walls, these vessels grow in length and twist themselves in the manner of a snake.’ He also notes that the liver, deprived of adequate blood supply, ‘becomes desiccated, like congealed bran in colour and substance’; and that the skin of the very old has ‘the colour of wood, or dried chestnuts, because the skin is almost completely deprived of nourishment’. Later, in a different ink, he writes a curt reminder: ‘Represent the arm of Francesco the miniaturist which exhibits many veins.’ On a related sheet he discusses whether the heart or the liver is the key organ of the vascular system, and concludes (with Aristotle, against Galen) that it is the heart, which he likens to the stone of a peach from which the ‘tree of the vessels’ grows.39
This highly practical, textural language – snake, bran, wood, chestnuts, peach-stone – is in marked contrast to the more metaphysical tone of his earlier anatomy of the late 1480s, with its interest in the ‘confluence of the senses’, and the traffic of ‘vital spirits’, and other traditional medieval postulates. A similar movement away from the metaphysical is found in his small tract on optics (now Paris MS D), written later in 1508, which stresses the purely receptive nature of the eye and the absence of any invisible or ‘spiritual’ rays emanating from it. (The traditional model held perception to be proactive in this way.) The eye may be the ‘window of the soul’, as he is fond of saying, but it is also a miniature machine whose working parts must be disassembled and understood.
Anatomical dissection of the shoulder and neck, from a Windsor folio of c. 1508–9.
Female genitalia and studies of the anal sphincter, c. 1508–9.
Of the same period, c. 1508–9, are beautifully drawn diagrams showing lungs and abdominal organs, perhaps of a pig, again with botanical analogies.40 These show Leonardo battling with problems of how to show anatomy – looking for that diagrammatic technique which combines surface detail with transparency. The anecdote in Vasari about him inflating a pig’s gut until it filled the room serves as a macabre footnote to this dissection of a pig. He likes to scare and unsettle people: the theatrical side of him.
Also from this time is the famous drawing showing the distended vulva of a woman, the genitalia unrealistically cavernous even if the drawing represents a multiparous or post-partum woman.41 I am tempted to connect this strange exaggeration with Leonardo’s earlier text about the ‘cavern’, and to suggest that the fear he expressed about looking into that ‘threatening dark cave’ was in part an unconscious confrontation with the disturbing mysteries of female sexuality. Within that Freudian sort of interpretation, the ‘marvellous thing’ that might be glimpsed within the cave would be the mystery of generation and birth. Here, however, in his notes below the drawing, Leonardo is content with a more laconic metaphor: ‘The wrinkles or ridges in the folds of the vulva have indicated to us the location of the gatekeeper of the castle.’ The image of a woman’s sex as a defended ‘castle’ or ‘fortress’, to be besieged and breached by the insistent male, is a commonplace of amorous poetry.42
On a related sheet are views of a standing female showing her uterus in early pregnancy; drawings of male and female genitals; a study of a cow’s uterus with a small foetus in it; and a detail of the cow’s placenta, whose tissues Leonardo describes as ‘interwoven like burrs’.43 These studies on reproduction seem to link with the generational theme of the Leda, on which he was plausibly at work in c. 1508–9 – there is a visual echo of Leda in the outline of the pregnant female. On the verso of the sheet is a wonderful page of studies of the mouth and its muscles, among them those ghostly lips which seem to have floated, Cheshire Cat-style, from the face of Mona Lisa.
The notes about the ‘old man’, written in late 1507 or early 1508, contain the first clear reference to Leonardo himself performing a human dissection, but he had probably done others before this, for on another anatomical page dated c. 1508 he claims to have personally dissected – disfatto: taken to pieces – ‘more than ten human bodies’.44 He boasts of his finesse with the scalpel. To arrive at ‘a true and perfect knowledge’ of the body’s veins he has removed ‘in the most minute particles all the flesh that lies around these veins, without causing any flow of blood save a scarcely perceptible bleeding of the capillary veins’. He also notes the procedural problems in the days before refrigeration: ‘As a single body would not last long enough, it was necessary to use several bodies in succession, so as to arrive at a complete knowledge [of the veins]; I repeated this process twice, in order to observe the variations.’ And he describes the challenges, indeed horrors, of the task. ‘You’ – the reader, the would-be anatomist – ‘will perhaps be deterred by the rising of your stomach.’
Some of these dissections were doubtless done, as were those of the ‘old man’ and the ‘boy’, at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. He knew the place well: it served as his bank and on occasions his depository. He must have had some kind of official licence for these – even the ‘doctors and scholars’ of the Florentine Studio had to seek permission from the magistrates before conducting a public dissection at Santa Croce in 1506.45 But it seems that not all the dissections Leonardo performed were done there. He speaks feelingly of ‘the fear of living at night-time in the company of these dead men, dismembered and flayed and terrible to behold’. He is perhaps playing this up a bit, but the implication is that he has done dissections in his own lodgings or studio, hence the specific fearfulness of spending the night with the corpses, which would not be required if he were dissecting them at Santa Maria Nuova.
Dissection was still controversial. It was permitted, under licence, but it remained a dubious activity around which clustered rumours and superstitions an implication of the ‘black arts’, of the fetishes and concoctions of medieval magic. The frequent use of cadavers from the gallows added a further frisson. Leonardo was keen to dissociate himself from such goings-on, which is why the passage describing his dissections also contains a spirited attack on fraudulent magicians:
Nature revenges herself on those who wish to perform miracles… for they live always in the direst poverty, as is and forever will be the case with alchemists who seek to create gold and silver, and engineers who wish to create living force out of dead water in perpetual motion, and most idiotic of all, necromancers and sorcerers.
Later, in Rome, Leonardo’s researches brought him into conflict with the Church, and he was ‘hindered in anatomy’ by an ill-wisher who reported his activities to the Pope. Such attitudes hardened with the Counter-Reformation. Half a century later the great Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius, author of the De humanis corporis fabrica (1543), was condemned to death by the Inquisition for ‘body-snatching’ and dissection; the sentence was commuted to a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but he died on the return journey, aged fifty.
When Leonardo talks of spending the night in the company of corpses we get a hint of dissections done behind closed doors, clandestine, tinged with heresy. For Leonardo the imperative of investigation is always stronger than that of personal comfort or doctrinal safety.