STUDY OF SHEETS A

OF THE "ANATOMY"

Taine's Opinion.

"Leonardo da Vinci, a precocious inventor of all modern ideas and all modern curiosities, a universal and refined genius, a solitary and insatiable seeker, pushes his divinations In this context, "divinations" refers to Leonardo's intuitive leaps or prophetic insights into scientific truths not yet proven in his time. beyond his century, sometimes reaching as far as our own¹)." Regarding this splendid judgment by an illustrious critic, the general public until recently could only verify its elements through partial or incomplete publications; and especially regarding anatomy and the various branches of biological sciences, what we knew of the drawings and notes left by Leonardo made us ardently desire to see more²). The work undertaken by Mr. T. Sabachnikoff Teodoro Sabachnikoff (1850–1912) was a Russian patron of the arts and sciences who funded the first high-quality facsimile editions of Leonardo’s anatomical notebooks., with the manuscripts already published and with those yet to follow, will place the original and complete sheets before everyone's eyes.

Leonardo's Motto.

"Study science first" was Leonardo da Vinci’s favorite maxim, and with him opens the era of science put to the service of the artist. With his knowledge of all the sciences of his time³), with the progress

¹) Taine, Philosophy of Art in Italy. original: "Philosophie de l'art en Italie." Hippolyte Taine was a hugely influential 19th-century French critic and historian.

²) Recently the professor of anatomy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Alessandro Lanzillotti-Buonsanti, expressed himself in the following terms: "I cannot conduct a study here on Leonardo as an anatomist and physiologist, because... the data available are not sufficient to perform an investigation of this kind now, for the reason that the manuscripts preserved at Windsor—the most precious for these sciences as well as for art—are known to us only through the scarce and incomplete extracts provided by Richter Jean Paul Richter (1847–1937) published "The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci" in 1883, which was the first major attempt to organize Leonardo's disparate notes.." (Alessandro Lanzillotti-Buonsanti, The Anatomical Thought of Leonardo da Vinci. Milan, 1897, p. 19.) And further on (p. 22): "The eminent place Leonardo occupies in anatomy and physiology cannot be appreciated except by consulting the enormous mass of his manuscripts existing in England. New surprises should therefore be expected the day these are published in their entirety.... Then a new chapter will need to be added to the history of natural sciences."

³) Nucharzenski, A Fifteenth-Century Engineer: Leonardo da Vinci. (Scientific Review, August 15, 1886). original: "Un ingénieur du quinzième siècle : Léonard de Vinci" (Revue scientifique).