STUDY ON FOLIOS A OF THE "ANATOMY"

...[the progress] that he brought to several of them, he was the most brilliant proof of the power that science gives to art, for he left only masterpieces, and in his Treatise on Painting original: "Traité de la peinture" he shares his secret with everyone: knowing how to see ⁴) original: "savoir voir". It is his contribution, his intuition, and his scholarly curiosities in anatomy and Biology that we must try to characterize here. I say in Biology, because Leonardo da Vinci did not concern himself only with the anatomy of man and animals; he touched upon all the most diverse questions relating to the study of living beings: to botany The scientific study of plants. ⁵), to paleontology The study of ancient life through fossil remains. or the science of fossils, to zoology, to physiology, and finally to animal anatomy properly so called.

Among these latter sciences, whose names did not even exist in his time, paleontology is certainly the most striking to point out. Leonardo da Vinci was the first to seek something other than a legend or a fable to account for the nature of petrified fish original: "poissons pétrifiés"; three centuries ahead of the scholars of his time, he dared to assert that these were not the first attempts of a so-called "creative force" to give birth to living forms, but rather organic remains, representing extinct forms that lived in previous eras, and that their petrification is the result of silt depositing at the bottom of the water and gradually enclosing these remains. It was only at the end of the last century that this nature and meaning of fossils were definitively established in accordance with Leonardo da Vinci's ideas, who was thus the precursor to Cuvier Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), the French naturalist who established the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology..

His notes on the flight of birds, on the gait of man and animals, on vision, on the functions of the nervous system, and even on the functions of generation In this context, the biological processes of reproduction and embryonic development. ⁶), all show that Leonardo da Vinci approached the study of living beings not only as an artist eager to understand external forms, but also and above all as a philosopher burning to penetrate the mechanism of the most intimate functions and the relationships of the deepest organs. This is what we shall see in—

4. Yves Guyot, Art and Science (Scientific Review original: "Revue scientifique", July 30, 1887).
5. Regarding botany, see L. Courajod and Ch. Ravaisson-Mollien, Conjectures regarding a marble bust of Beatrice d'Este and Study on the botanical knowledge of Leonardo da Vinci (Gazette of Fine Arts original: "Gazette des beaux-arts", October 1877). — From a more general perspective: G. Séailles, Leonardo da Vinci, the Artist and the Scholar. Paris, 1892.
6. Mathias-Duval, A Biologist of the Fifteenth Century: Leonardo da Vinci (Scientific Review original: "Revue scientifique", December 7, 1889).