Leonardo and Anatomy

Leonardo’s anatomical studies actually set themselves as an ideal meeting point between artistic and scientific interests because the study of the functioning of the body was essential for artistic practice in order to achieve the correct representation of the human figure. For Leonardo, the artistic practice was determined by an inexhaustible desire for knowledge that led him to study the human body through the Vitruvian proportions and through dissection, carried out by the artist with special care over the middle years of the first decade of the sixteenth century. Drawing becomes essential to understand and reproduce the structure of the male and female body, a “wonderful machine” perfectly thought out. The organs are devices and the body is a machine: Man then becomes a further testing ground for mechanical science.