Leonardos anatomical studies

And you, who say it would be better to witness an anatomical dissection than to look at these drawings, you would be right if it were possible to see everything that my drawings depict in a single illustration.

In anatomy, even with all skill, you see only a few veins, and those are the only ones you get to know. On the other hand, in order to know them completely and accurately, I have dissected more than ten human bodies, destroying all other parts and gradually removing all flesh surrounding those veins without staining them with blood, except for the barely noticeable bleeding of the capillaries. And a corpse does not last so long, so I had to work on several corpses successively to learn everything completely. And to observe the differences, I did the whole thing twice.

And even if you are inclined towards these things, perhaps nausea may deter you.

And if that doesn't deter you, maybe the fear of staying overnight in the company of dismembered, skinned, and gruesome-looking corpses will.

And if that doesn't deter you, perhaps you lack the artistic talent required for such representation.

And if you have the talent for drawing, perhaps you lack [knowledge of] perspective.

And if you have that, perhaps you lack the ability to apply mathematical laws and calculate the movement and force of the muscles.

And maybe you lack patience if you are not diligent.

Whether I was able to bring all these qualities or not, the one hundred twenty books I have written will judge. I have been hindered neither by stinginess nor negligence but solely by time. Farewell.

And this old man told me a few hours before he died that he was already over a hundred years old and did not feel at all that he was missing anything, but only that he was weak. And in the Santa Maria Nova Hospital in Florence, sitting on a bed, without any other movement and without any sign of illness, he passed away in this way. And I dissected him to find out the cause of such a gentle death: I found that he had died because of the failure of the blood and artery supplying the heart and other lower limbs, which I found very dry, flaccid, and desiccated. In this anatomy I recognized everything thoroughly and effortlessly, because there was neither fat nor moisture, which makes it quite difficult to recognize the individual parts. The other anatomy was that of a two-year-old child, in whom I found the opposite of everything I had found in the old one.

This gentleman [Leonardo da Vinci] treated anatomy with painting, both of limbs and of muscles, nerves, veins, joints, viscera, and of what can be said about the bodies of men and women, in a way that no other man has ever done and that we have seen with our own eyes. And already he told us that he had done the anatomy of more than 30 bodies of men and women of all ages.