Leonardo da vinci anatomy biography of william

Alastair Sooke looks through the ultimate Renaissance man’s anatomical sketchbooks – scientific masterpieces full of lucid insights into the functioning of the human body.

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 cur