Folio IV · Anatomia · Anatomical research
Research led by dissection and published — had I finished the treatise — in drawings rather than words. By the account of a visitor in 1517, I had dissected more than thirty bodies.
“The more minutely you describe, the more you will confuse the mind of the reader.” Hence: drawings.
A man inscribed at once in a circle and a square: a test of the Roman architect Vitruvius’s claim that the body is the measure of all building. I checked his ratios against living models and corrected them.
The first of my anatomical series: a skull cut to show its cavities in relation to one another — the eye socket, the sinuses — with a precision no textbook of the time could match.
Drawn after the winter I worked with Marcantonio della Torre at Pavia: muscles shown as cords of force, the same figure rotated through several views like a model turned in the hand.
The child folded within the uterus, the placenta and membranes peeled away layer by layer. Some details were inferred from animal dissection, and I say so in the notes.
Not anatomy of the inside but of expression: faces pushed to their extremes, to learn how features move with feeling.
Findings ahead of their time