STUDY ON FOLIOS A OF THE "ANATOMY"

Such were the conditions in which the Renaissance artists found themselves, and Leonardo da Vinci comes precisely first in chronological order to inaugurate this new era of scientific research.

Physicians, for their part, had also understood the necessity of deepening their knowledge of the human organism, about which the ancients—Galen Galen of Pergamon (129–c. 216 AD): a Greek physician whose theories dominated Western medical science for over 1,300 years himself—had only notions deduced from the study of animals. It is proven, in fact, as unlikely as it may seem, that Galen, who was the great anatomist of antiquity, had dissected only the bodies of monkeys; for we see him in his writings, after having deplored the difficulty of obtaining even human bones, rejoicing in the good fortune he had "to examine at will human bones, which the current of a flooded river had cast into a swampy place after having destroyed a grave."

The first anatomists.

But if methodical dissections were undertaken in the medical schools of Italy as early as the thirteenth century, it is easy to see that their results could provide only very little help to the artists who, in the fifteenth century, wanted—like Leonardo da Vinci—to acquire precise anatomical knowledge in their turn. In fact, it was only in 1316 that Mondino dei Luzzi (a professor at Bologna) compiled the first treatise on human anatomy containing descriptions made upon the cadaver, and this work, initially in the state of a manuscript copied by students, was printed for the first time in Venice in 1478. But Mondino’s treatise, properly speaking, is nothing more than a study of the different viscera viscera: the internal organs in the main cavities of the body, especially those in the abdomen and organs contained in the three great cavities of the body (abdomen, thorax, head). It has been rightly said that, despite what the author had before his eyes, he described these organs according to Galen and the Arab authors rather than from nature; for, to cite only one example, in the presence of the four-lobed human liver, he does not dare to reject the five lobes attributed to the hepatic organ original: "organo epatico" (liver) according to the notions taken from animal anatomy.

We insist on these details to show that Leonardo da Vinci could draw only little profit from the early anatomical works undertaken by physicians ⁹⁾. By this, we do not mean to say that he did not take part in the—

Reading (Folio 18, recto) the passage that begins with the words: "Mondino says that the muscles that raise the toes of the feet..." original Italian: "Dice Mondino che li muscoli che alzano li diti del piedi...", one will see that Leonardo had carefully meditated