Saturday, July 7, 2012

'Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist' at the Royal Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 7th July 2012

I always figured I'd end up in Buckingham Palace at some point, but I assumed I'd be dragged there in chains rather than invited.  So it was with a little trepidation that I accepted their invitation for a private viewing of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.  These kinds of invitations don't come along every day, and I figure I can take a minor dent to my republican credentials.  Anyway, my chances of running into the Queen are minimal, and I think it's worth suffering through a bit of monarchist jingle-jangle to have a wander around inside the notebooks of one of the most versatile geniuses the human race has ever produced.

The night before I'd been to see a conversation between the curator, Prof Martin Clayton and Dr Alice Roberts, which laid the groundwork for this exhibition.  The notebooks themselves are the product of sporadic yet intense periods of anatomical research in Leonardo's life.  Under artists and anatomists such as Andrea del Verrocchio and Marcantonio della Torre, Leonardo had access to corpses and body parts which he dissected with care and attention, recording everything that he found in meticulous detail whilst also formulating theories to explain the mechanics of his discoveries.  The endpoint of all this study was to have been a treatise on human anatomy.  Tragically it was never completed.  Leonardo died in 1519, leaving a vast and disordered collection of documents - a mammoth task for anyone to sort through.  The notebooks then passed through various hands, eventually travelling to Britain where they were acquired for the Royal Collection by (we assume) Charles II.  Even so, they were not publicly displayed until the early 20th century.  

Anatomy of a woman - Leonardo da Vinci
When they were finally re-examined and translated it was discovered that Leonardo was formulating theories about anatomy, bodily mechanics and structure that were hundreds of years ahead of their time.  If he had published during his lifetime the science of anatomy would have taken an enormous leap forward, with all the attendant benefits to medicine.

The work is presented thoughtfully, dividing up the pages by their anatomical focus but also with an eye to presenting them as a kind of timeline.  We begin by watching a short introductory film, and then by viewing Leonardo's first anatomical works.  He began his studies working from the received principles of anatomy in Renaissance society, for example that the brain was divided into three ventricles, with imagination in the first, reason in the middle and memory at the back.  His early studies of the head reflect this view.  It's important to note that these early studies are made without the benefit of having dissection subjects and frequently contain inaccurate extrapolations from studies of the anatomies of pigs and oxen.

Pathways of sight - Leonardo da Vinci (note the three chambers in the brain)
As we move through the gallery the quality and accuracy of the drawings increases.  The periods when Leonardo had direct access to cadavers produce stunning works of scientific beauty.  It is often assumed that there was a taboo about dissection at this time, and that there was religious opposition to anatomical studies.  In fact, in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries, dissection and the pursuit of knowledge was positively encouraged.  Pope Sixtus IV even went so far as issuing a papal bull specifically permitting bishops to provide artists and scientists with the bodies of executed criminals and unidentified people for the purposes of anatomical study. 

This explosion of knowledge from Leonardo is divided by anatomical area, so we have different walls dedicated to, among others, the nervous system, the reproductive system or the vocal cords.  The drawings are executed with mechanical precision, we are able to see how everything fits together.  He makes excellent use of  cut-aways which show us in close-up the function of a particular set of muscles, or a different cross-section of what is shown in another picture.

The anatomy of the hand - Leonardo da Vinci 
One common tactic Leonardo uses is to 'strip away' the body from the skin down.  Usually beginning in the upper right and proceeding right-to-left we strip away the muscle groups, exposing what is below them, before demonstrating the nerves running through the area and finally the bone structure underneath it all.  If nothing else this proves him as a master diagrammaticist, but I find works like this also produce a strange psychological effect in the observer.  It is difficult not to begin to relate this stripping away of flesh to your own body and to become conscious of yourself as a mechanical process.  I watched people standing in front of the above diagram which shows the flesh of the hand being stripped away to reveal the system of tendons running up through the arm.  Consciously or not, most people seem to flex their fingers or twist their wrists around, trying to 'feel' what Leonardo has drawn on the page.

The notion of your body as simple mechanics is a bit disconcerting, and brings with it a number of somewhat fatalistic thoughts.  One of Leonardo's major dissection subjects was an old man, "the centenarian".  A man who claimed to be over 100 who died of seemingly natural causes.  We repeatedly come across sketches which are presumed to be from the body of this man, and his ruined, cirrhosed liver and calcified aortic valves make me feel slightly uneasy about what is going on under my skin.  After all, this old man apparently felt nothing but a slight weakness before his death and yet his liver is "like congealed brain both in colour and substance, so that when it is subjected to the slightest friction it's substance falls away in small particles like sawdust".  An excellent description yet one that produces disquieting thoughts.

Rotation of the muscles of the arm - Leonardo da Vinci
There is a flipside though, although the work does produce slightly depressing ponderings about the notion of the human body as a deteriorating and decaying piece of meat, Leonardo almost without effort shows the 'divine' nature of the architecture of the anatomy.  I find his studies of the muscles of the arm the most beautiful of his works.  A series of rotations of the arms showing every muscle group fitting together beautifully is, according the exhibition, the best graphic representation of this structure ever.  There is a care and attention paid to the human body that showcases the humanist side of Leonardo here.  It should be remembered that these are drawings taken from studies of dissections, the muscles observed will have been viewed while limp and dead.  Yet Leonardo brings them back to life, showing them in their full radiance, in some ways the artist's eye serves us better here than a computer simulation.  We can see his deep understanding of how to depict musculature in this quote:

"You should not make all the muscles of your figures conspicuous; even if they are shown in the correct place they should not be made too evident, unless the limbs to which they belong are engaged in the exertion of great force or labour.  The limbs that are not under stain should have no such display of musculature.  If you do otherwise you will have a produced a sack of nuts rather than a human being." 

Movements of the shoulder - Leonardo da Vinci
Another example of humanity in his anatomy can be seen in the above sequence showing the movements of the shoulder of one of his anatomical studies.  The exhibition informs me that these drawings were probably made in situ, that is the dissection subject being posed, a drawing made, and then re-posed. There's somehow a tenderness and respect in the positioning, in the way that Leonardo doesn't treat the corpse as raw material, but as what was once a person and what must now be for him a treasure trove of anatomical secrets.

The only frustration with this exhibition is that even with the vast amount of graphic information on display, and even with the very informative panels that concisely explain what we're looking it, I still didn't feel like I was getting the full picture.  Each page of the notebook is generally covered in paragraphs of Leonardo's small and precise handwriting detailing his thoughts about what he is illustrating and what to note in the drawings.  The handwriting is written backward, and from right to left (for reasons of ease rather than trying to encode them, Leonardo was left-handed).  We are given no clues as to what he is writing about, and it's a little frustrating not being told or being able to look up what he's talking about.  There is one display that translates a single page, and it's clear and easily understandable scientific language.  This only whets my appetite; in an exhibition where you feel like you're being given an insight into the man's mind, you want to know it all.  I understand that translating all the text would likely create some kind of information overload, but I'd like to see what they could do with an application of technology that'd let visitors select paragraphs and automatically translate them.

Apart from this minor, and entirely understandable problem you couldn't ask for a better presentation.  The pages are presented in blocks of glass, so we can see both sides, and we can get extremely close to them, a necessity given that they're so small and intricate.  One aspect I particularly liked was the small rooms where a comparison of a modern anatomical figure and Leonardo's drawings is given.  A notice board in one of them points out that even modern 3D anatomical models take artistic liberties in presentation to allow us to comprehend them, and seeing how 21st century anatomy directly correlates with Leonardo's techniques only underlines how talented he was.

Detailed analysis of the structure of the heart - Leonardo da Vinci
The exhibition doesn't deify Leonardo, one of his biggest failures was his inability to reconcile the accepted wisdom of how the circulatory system functions with what he was discovering about the function of the heart.  The Renaissance view was that blood was produced in the liver, cooled in the lungs, pumped by the heart and consumed by the muscles.  Leonardo made some enormous strides forward in understanding the function and mechanics of the heart, discovering among other things that the heart is a muscle, that it doesn't cool the blood, that it has four chambers, exactly how the heart valves work and the way blood moves through the heart.  From our perspective he was just one tiny leap towards understanding the pulmonary and systemic circuits and how oxygenated and de-oxygenated blood is pumped by the heart around the body. But after long frustrating hours trying to reconcile his anatomical studies of the heart with  received wisdom he gave up.  Prof. Martin Clayton describes this as Leonardo's 'Homer Simpson' moment.  It's an interesting reminder that even the man regularly placed at the top of the pantheon of geniuses was fallible.  

The fact that this amazing work lay unobserved for so long lends a certain amount of melancholy to it.  This is work that might have changed the world of medicine if it had been published within Leonardo's lifetime.  In that parallel universe we might think of Leonardo da Vinci as the greatest anatomist of all time who did a bit of painting on the side.  It is notable that the 'History of Anatomy' page on Wikipedia doesn't even mention Leonardo's work. 

The human skeleton - Leonardo da Vinci
The fact that this was not published seems to owe something to the vast breadth of Leonardo's interests but in retrospect also to just plain bad luck.  If it wasn't for a series of wars interrupting his studies and forcing him to relocate he may well have published within his lifetime.  As it is this work, amazing as it may be, is something of a vestigial organ in the history of anatomy, an evolutionary dead end.  

This exhibition is a monument to a great intelligence.  An intelligence that will talk communicate directly with you if you're open to it.  But it's also a warning about the importance of finishing what you start.  Leonardo discovered knowledge that wouldn't be re-discovered for hundreds of years, and while we can appreciate the beauty and accuracy of it, this is knowledge that could have changed the world.  It's sad that it didn't.

'Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist' is on until 21st October 2012 at the Royal Gallery, Buckingham Palace.

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