Leonardo Da Vinci's Anatomy art
Leonardo da Vinci’s groundbreaking anatomical sketches
Alastair Sooke looks through the ultimate Renaissance man’s anatomical sketchbooks – scientific masterpieces full of lucid insights into the functioning of the human body.
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By Alastair Sooke
21 October 2014
We tend to think of Leonardo da Vinci as a painter, even though he probably produced no more than 20 pictures before his death in 1519. Yet for long periods of his career, which lasted for nearly half a century, he was engrossed in all sorts of surprising pursuits, from stargazing and designing ingenious weaponry to overseeing a complex system of canals for Ludovico Maria Sforza, the ruling duke of Milan. During the course of his life, Leonardo filled thousands of pages of manuscript with dense doodles, diagrams, and swirling text, probing almost every conceivable topic. Not for nothing, then, is he often considered the archetypal Renaissance man: as the great British art historian Kenneth Clark put it, Leonardo was the most relentlessly curious person in history.
Yet according to Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man, a new exhibition at the Edinburgh International Festival,