1. Introduction (p 1-8)

2. Anatomy research (p 9- 14)

3. Anatomical drawings of Leonardo: a comparison with nowadays knowledge. (p 15 & 16)

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian… Painter: he did famous paintings such as the

Mona Lisa and the Last Supper.

Sculptor: he designed the rearing horse and mounted warrior, but he finally didn’t sculped it.

Inventor: He invented many objects used in our ordinary life and many other things: flying machines, the first car, the bycicle…

Anatomist: He drew many parts of the human body, which helped a lot in medicine. He also made studies in dead people and animals. Thanks to them, he made a lot of discoveries about the inside of our body.

Architect: he designed some plans. Musician. Mathematician: He determined the

gravitational centre of a semicircle and of a pyramid by different methods.

Engineer. Geologist. Cartographer. Botanist. Writer.

He was born near the Tuscan town of Vinci and he died in Château of Cloux, France.

He lived during the Renaissance period between 1452 to 1519.

During his life, he lived and worked in Venice, Florence, Milan, Mantua, Rome, Bologna… And he met a lot of important people such as Ludivico il Moro, Verrochio, Michelangelo…

Before Leonardo made his studies, discoveries, and anatomical drawings, people didn’t know anything about the inside of the human body. Nobody knew about Leonardo’s investigations because the church didn’t permit him to open human bodies.

When Leonardo died, his studies were stored and were not published. When the drawings were published, about 150 years later, most of his anatomical studies were already discovered. But they helped a lot in medicine (not as much as they could have helped if they were published before).

To know more about human anatomy, Leonardo did about thirty dissections of corpses. The studies were:

Fetus in the womb.

The abdominal organs. Two skulls.

Anatomy of the eye, section of a man's head

… and many others of some parts of the body such as the arm, the heart, the feet, the legs, the reproductve systems, muscles, tendons…

As it has been said before, Leonardo da Vinci made some studies with dead bodies. At the beggining, Leonardo stole the corpses, because it was prohibited to open them. Then, they permitted him to use the bodies of dead criminals. Later some hospitals offered him to take the bodies of people who had died there.

Observation was used a lot to make the studies and the drawings. This explains why his anatomical drawings were so accurate in relation to the others at his time.

Finally he made an enormous recopilation of a lot of anatomical drawings and studies.

The best ones are the ones of the bones and the skeleton, the arms and the legs.

Leonardo’s anatomical drawings appeared in the 20th century. They were not discovered before because the son of Leonardo’s assistant sold them to an Italian sculptor who stored them in a notebook with other artistic paintings. As nobody knew abot them, the drawings were not published.

Some experts say that if his drawings had ben published before, the European anatomical knowledge would have been better.

In both images we can see a baby inside the mother’s uterus, but we find some differences between them. The main one is that Leonardo drew a baby with wrong proportions because the drawing of the baby is more similar to an adult than to a baby. In the real picture we can observe that the head of the fetus is bigger than in the drawing and the body is smaller. Also the legs and the arms of the Leonardo’s one are longer.

As we can observe in these images, the drawings of leonardo are quite similar to the real skeleton. We can say they are amazingly accurate if we take into account that these drawings were done in the 17th

century and with the methods of that period.