STUDY OF FOLIOS A

OF THE "ANATOMY"

"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 own ¹)." This splendid judgment by an illustrious critic could formerly be verified by the general public only through partial or incomplete publications; and for anatomy in particular, as with various branches of the biological sciences, what we knew of the drawings and notes left by Leonardo made us ardently desire to see more ²). The work undertaken by Mr. Th. Sabachnikoff Teodoro Sabachnikoff (1850–1912) was a Russian patron and scholar who funded the first high-quality facsimiles of Leonardo’s notebooks. will, through the manuscripts already published and those yet to follow, place the original and complete pieces before everyone's eyes.

"Study science first," was his favorite maxim, and with him opens the era of science put to the service of the artist. Through his knowledge of all the sciences of his time ³), through the progress

1. Taine, Philosophy of Art in Italy original: "Philosophie de l'art en Italie." Hippolyte Taine was a highly influential 19th-century French critic and historian..
2. Very recently, the professor of anatomy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Aless. Lanzillotti-Buonsanti, expressed himself in these terms: "I cannot provide a complete study here on Leonardo as an anatomist and physiologist, because the data we possess in this regard are still incomplete; the manuscripts preserved at Windsor The Royal Collection at Windsor Castle holds the largest collection of Leonardo's anatomical drawings., the most precious and richest from an anatomical standpoint, are only known to us through the incomplete extracts given by Richter Jean Paul Richter (1847–1937) was a German art historian who published 'The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci' in 1883.." (Aless. Lanzillotti-Buonsanti. The Anatomical Thought of Leonardo da Vinci. Milan, 1897, p. 19.) And further on (p. 22): "Leonardo’s character as an eminent anatomist can only be appreciated by consulting the enormous mass of his manuscripts preserved in England. Great will be the surprise the day these notes are published in a complete manner.... Then there will be a new chapter to add to the history of natural sciences."
3. Nucharzenski, An Engineer of the Fifteenth Century: Leonardo da Vinci (Scientific Review original: "Revue scientifique", August 15, 1886).