Sublime

Soon after his return to Florence, Michelangelo was commissioned to turn a hulking and imperfect piece of white marble into a statue of the biblical Goliath-slayer, David. Working with his usual secrecy, by early 1504 he had produced the most famous statue ever carved (fig. 97). Seventeen feet high and dazzlingly bright, it instantly eclipsed all p

Thus did Leonardo pioneer a new form of anatomical drawing, perhaps better described in his case as anatomical art, that is still in use today.

During this period of intense anatomical study, Leonardo made 240 drawings and wrote at least thirteen thousand words of text, illustrating and describing every bone, muscle group, and major organ in the human body for what would have been, if it had been published, his most historic scientific triumph.

There are two key differences that distinguish Leonardo’s version of Vitruvian Man from those done around the same time by his two friends, Francesco di Giorgio and Giacomo Andrea. In both scientific precision and artistic distinction, Leonardo’s is in an entirely different realm (fig. 44). Rarely on display, because prolonged exposure to light wou

“The originality of the skull drawings of 1489 is so fundamentally different and superior to all other extant illustrations of the time that they are completely out of character with the age,” according to Francis Wells, a surgeon and an expert on the anatomical drawings.8 To the left of the face Leonardo drew each of the four types of human teeth,

L’utilisation du sfumato, cet effet vaporeux qui adoucit les contours, est déjà à l’époque une marque de fabrique de Léonard. Alberti, dans son traité sur la peinture, conseille de dessiner des traits précis, et c’est exactement ce que fait Verrocchio. Léonard, parce qu’il prend soin d’observer le monde réel, a compris quant à lui que le conseil d’

Just as Leonardo’s anatomy informed his art, so was the reverse true: his artistic, sculpting, drawing, and engineering skills crossed disciplines and aided his anatomical studies. In a groundbreaking experiment, he used sculpture and casting techniques to map the hollow cavities, known as cerebral ventricles, in the human brain