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L eonardo Da Vinci is famous as a painter, sculptor and inventor. In reality he was so much more, with the range of topics in his arsenal of knowledge being anatomy, zoology, botany, geology, optics, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics to name a few. He did play a large role in the development of knowledge about anatomy and the human body. He was one of the greatest anatomists of his time, although unrecognized for it during his lifetime. Today-more than five hundred years after it was created, there is probably no more recognizable drawing of the human body than Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man”. Vitruvian Man”, although well known, many people still do not know the meaning, or the idea that Da Vinci was trying to portray other than a man with four arms and four legs. The drawing is supposed to represent the same man superimposed in two different positions. Like many things associated with Da Vinci it has a mathematic basis to it. He was attempting to enforce a scientific method using mathematical laws onto the human anatomy. He didn’t just draw the man; he kept notebooks with accurate measures of all of the parts of the body’s proportions, trying to find a universal perfection of proportions.
Leonardo’s formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio. The teacher insisted all his students study and learn human anatomy. He quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features. After he became a successful artist he took his interest even further. After he was given permission by a hospital in Florence, Italy, he began to study the body through dissecting corpses.
When Da Vinci performed his dissections he was only allowed to perform them on criminals, very rarely people who died of natural causes. He had to work very quickly and under horrible conditions. The bodies could not be preserved or frozen, because the technology for this did not exist yet. Da Vinci was entirely oblivious to any smell that there was, showing his obvious devotion. He made sure to be extremely careful and precise while performing a dissection, knowing exactly what he was looking for and removing pieces of flesh from the body so he could analyze a specific system or organ.
Also showing his devotion, he would perform two dissections for one part of the body so he could note the differences so his result would be the most accurate it could possibly be. He also studied and drew the anatomy of many animals to compare their anatomical structure with that of humans. From 1510 to 1511 he worked with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a book on anatomy, that Leonardo had made more than 200 drawings for. It was published in 1680, 161 years after his death, under the heading Treatise on Painting Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton.
They included the parts, as well as muscles, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. The first biographer of Leonardo da Vinci, Paolo Giovi, wrote in 1520: “in the medical faculty he learned to dissect the cadavers of criminals under inhuman, disgusting conditions… because he wanted to examine and to draw the different deflections and reflections of limbs and their dependence upon the nerves and the joints. This is why he paid attention to the forms of even very small organs, capillaries and hidden parts of the skeleton. “
In the course of twenty years of study from 1489 to his death Leonardo dissected at least 19 corpses. So much more is involved than simply recording the evidence of cadavers. He recognizes that in the process of dissecting a body, blood and other tissues often get in the way, and prevent one from drawing accurately. He remedies this by advising that the anatomist should make a model of the organ that he is dissecting and then use this as the basis for his drawing. In other words model making and scientific art go hand in hand: we must reconstruct reality before we can represent it.
In the case of a hand or a leg these models are used primarily to reveal structure in terms of relationships between different layers of arteries, muscles, bones, etc. These layers vary in number from eight to ten. In other cases these models are intended to reveal both structure and function. For instance, Leonardo makes a glass model of the heart such that the flow of millet seeds in clear water or using water with different colored dyes so that flow patterns can be traced.
He deals with anatomy and physiology together and doesn’t make a clear distinction between them, like we do today in modern medicine. One of the most striking features of his notebooks is the manner in which he presents his work. There is no criticism of earlier authors, nor boasting of his own accomplishments. His style is in the form of a teaching manual with descriptions written as advice, showing how someone might proceed if they were performing the same tasks as Da Vinci. The drawings are famous for their anatomical accuracy and the virtuosity of the pen and ink technique employed.
Medics today still use his drawings for reference. Not only did Leonardo investigate the human body through anatomical dissection, he also created inner bodily mechanisms that perfectly fulfilled their function. This made him very different to other Renaissance artists who used dissection only to improve their painting. Just one of his findings is the discovery of the maxillary sinus cavity. His findings in the field of anatomy are endless. Many people are unaware of this and know him only as a painter and inventor.
He was so much more and to list just some of what this man discovered relating to the human body would take me all day. He was a genius of his time, people comparing him to Benjamin Franklin. It is too bad that he was not recognized for this until after his death. To this day many things in the field of modern medicine are still referenced in one way or another to Da Vinci’s discoveries. Without Da Vinci who knows how far man would be today with understanding the anatomical and physiological makeup of our own bodies.