Leonardo’s Anatomical Drawings, 1510

Many readers may be familiar with the paintings Mona Lisa and The Last Supper by the Italian genius, scientist and artist Leonardo da Vinci, for which he is famous.

While in Milan as early as 1489, Leonardo formulated his grand plan for a comprehensive set of drawings and descriptions of the human body, the Treatise on Anatomy. Although Leonardo outlined his plan, he never completed the work.

During his anatomical studies for the treatise, Leonardo made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in the womb. His pioneering methods of injecting wax into the brain’s ventricles to understand their shapes better were also fascinating. According to the museum director at Boston’s Museum of Science, "The unpleasantness of Leonardo’s anatomical studies cannot be overstated. In his passion for knowledge, Leonardo kept countless grisly vigils with local corpses, whose frustrating tendency to decay forced him to work as quickly as possible. He described it as "spending the night hours in the company of quartered and flayed corpses, fearful to behold," but, as always, curiosity drove him further."

Journalist Katie Lambert writes: "His notebooks contained magnificent and oddly shaped body parts, fetuses and couples in the midst of intercourse. Notes crowd the drawings, allowing a glimpse into da Vinci’s mind as he questions how a fetus breathes and what the testicles do."

In 1517, near the end of his life and partially paralyzed, Leonardo was visited by Cardinal Louis d’Aragon and his secretary, Antonio de Beatis. After Leonardo showed his visitors various anatomical drawings, Beatis recorded in his diary: “Leonardo compiled a special treatise on anatomy with illustrated representations of the limbs, as well as muscles, nerves, veins, joints, intestines and everything that could possibly be imagined in a human body, as no one had done before."

Description of the article image: Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a fetus in the womb with the umbilical cord visible (c. 1510).

Historical figures mentioned in the article: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Louis d’Aragon (1475–1519)

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