Biographies & Memoirs

The ‘Medical Schools’

On a page of anatomical drawings Leonardo writes, ‘In questa vernata del mille 510 credo spedire tutta la notomia’ – ‘In this spring of 1510 I expect to complete all the work on anatomy.’97 This was perhaps written in Pavia, where Leonardo spent some months attending the anatomy lectures of Marcantonio della Torre, a new master in the field. Theirs was described by Vasari as a mutually beneficial partnership: ‘each helped and was helped by the other.’ Leonardo refers to della Torre as ‘messer Marcantonio’ in a note concerning a certain ‘libro dell’aque’.98 This ‘book of waters’ may be about urine-diagnosis, much used by physicians at this time.

Marcantonio della Torre was in his late twenties, a Veronese. His father, Girolamo, was a celebrated professor at Padua, where Marcantonio began his career. In 1509 he migrated to Pavia, and there – probably towards the end of that year – arrived Leonardo to study with him or under him at the famous old university. Pavia was a city with pleasant memories – he had spent some days there in 1490 with Francesco di Giorgio Martini (dead since 1502), measuring up the cathedral, admiring the prancing horse of the famousRegisole, and watching the workmen replacing the embankment along the Ticino river which runs through the city.

We may imagine that Marcantonio gave Leonardo the place of honour in the anatomy theatre. While his assistants carved up the cadaver and he lectured on the various body parts to his students, Leonardo rapidly recorded with drawings. Among della Torre’s pupils was the young Paolo Giovio, whose comments on Leonardo’s anatomical work are probably based on first-hand knowledge:

He dedicated himself to the inhuman and disgusting work of dissecting the corpses of criminals in the medical schools, so that he might be able to paint the various joints and muscles as they bend and stretch according to the laws of nature. And he made wonderfully skilled scientific drawings of every part of the body, even showing the tiniest veins and the inside of bones.

These dissections done ‘in the medical schools’ may specifically refer to Leonardo in Pavia. In 1508 Leonardo said he had performed ‘more than ten’ human dissections; nine years later, in conversation with Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, he put the number at thirty. By this reckoning – his own – he performed about twenty dissections between 1508 and 1517: some of these would have been done in the ‘schools’ in Pavia, and some in Rome, where he speaks of his work ‘at the hospital’.

Much of della Torre’s written work has perished, but one piece that survives is a spirited attack on ‘abbreviatori’ – in other words those who simply rehashed previous knowledge in digestible form. His particular bête noire was the author Mundinus (or Mondino de Liuzzi), whose Anatomia had been published in Pavia in 1478 and whom Leonardo himself quotes on a couple of occasions.99 Della Torre urged a return to the original texts of Galen which Mundinus had merely paraphrased. This may be connected with Leonardo’s own diatribes against these same ‘abbreviators’. On a sheet of closely written notes about the action of the heart is a marginal comment: ‘Make a discourse censuring scholars who are the hinderers of anatomical studies, and the abbreviators thereof.’ And on the verso is another: ‘Those who abbreviate such works should be called not abbreviators but expungers [obliatori, literally those who bring oblio or oblivion].’ The threatened ‘discourse’ is probably the long tirade on another anatomical sheet:

The abbreviators of works insult both knowledge and love, seeing that the love of something is the offspring of knowledge of it… It is true that impatience, the mother of stupidity, praises brevity, as if we did not have a whole lifetime in which to acquire complete knowledge of a single subject, such as the human body.100

The page contains two drawings showing a dissected heart opened up like a sliced fruit.

The shallow-brained abbreviators are an affront to Leonardo as he amasses his own painstaking portfolio of notes and drawings, whose purpose by now is clear: to create a masterwork on anatomy, suitable for publication, and offering for the first time a detailed visual description of the workings of the human body. This was Leonardo’s great innovation – not only to describe anatomy with the inadequate instrument of language, as in the medieval texts on the subject, but also to display it in sharp visual detail, free of the abstractions, metaphors and general mental clutter to which language, he felt, always tended:

O writer! What words can you find to describe the whole arrangement [of the heart] as perfectly as is done in this drawing? For lack of true knowledge you describe it confusedly and convey little knowledge of the true shapes of things… My advice is not to trouble yourself with words unless you are speaking to the blind.101

He developed the technique of multiple representation, ranging from the all-round view to transparency, from cross-section to the precise sfumatura of the enclosing shape:

True knowledge of the shape of any body is arrived at by seeing it from different aspects. Thus to express the true shape of any limb of a man… I will observe the aforesaid rule, making 4 demonstrations for the 4 sides of each limb. And for the bones I will make 5, cutting them in half and showing the hollow of each of them, of which one is full of marrow, and the other spongy or empty or solid.102

This plurality of points of view – sometimes up to eight different angles – creates a sequence which has been described as almost cinematographic.

In the ‘inhuman and disgusting’ business of dissection, with its sawing of bones and its rummaging among guts, and the spurting up of pressurized human fat when the skin is incised, we find Leonardo a long way from the image of the dandified, rosewater-scented artist of his younger days. The anatomical drawings are the product of Leonardo at his most grimly empirical. In them, writes Edward Lucie-Smith, ‘he puts his skill at the service of truth rather than of some ideal of beauty… The anatomical drawings in this sense are not beautiful at all, but represent the way in which physical beauty must, literally, be sacrificed to the kind of truth which can only be reached through butchery.’103

For all this, Leonardo never quite renounced his fascination with analogies – between anatomical structures and geometric forms (as can be seen in his drawings which seek to relate the tricuspid valve of the heart to semicircular ‘lunes’) and between human and plant organisms (as in the drawing which places a germinating bean seedling next to a study of the human trachea).104

Leonardo’s intense collaboration with Marcantonio della Torre was abruptly ended by Marcantonio’s death in 1511, at the age of twenty-nine. He died on the shores of Lake Garda, a victim of the plague which devastated the Verona region – his homeland – in that year. He was probably infected while ministering to the sick.

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