preview

Leonardo Da Vinci Is Famous As A Painter, Sculptor And

Good Essays

Leonardo Da Vinci is famous as a painter, sculptor and inventor. In reality he was so much more, with the range of topics in his arsenal of knowledge being anatomy, zoology, botany, geology, optics, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics to name a few. He did play a large role in the development of knowledge about anatomy and the human body. He was one of the greatest anatomists of his time, although unrecognized for it during his lifetime.

Anatomical studies were primarily for the purpose of better depiction of the human body and presumably went no further than a study of the superficial structures. Da Vinci’s acquaintance with anatomy in the beginning would be that of the artist, and it must be remembered that his fame was gained primarily as …show more content…

(Ochenkowski, 199)
The earliest anatomical drawings by Leonardo are attributed to 1487. On the basis of these drawings certain facts become manifest. It is apparent that his knowledge of anatomy was what he had acquired by reading traditional writers such as Avicenna and Mundinus, by some animal dissection and by surface inspection of the living human. (Morley, 554)

With his return to Florence, Leonardo again took up his anatomical studies, and it appears that for the first time he had access to a reasonably large amount of dissection material, obtained at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. As the dates of his drawings indicate, he had further dissection specimens available to him, although whether he during this Florentine period ever became the possessor of an entire cadaver there is no certainty. At the beginning of this period he was still an amateur in the anatomical discipline, and his remarkable observations emphasized his genius. It is wondered how much dissection Da Vinci actually did and despite his remarkable observations of arteriosclerosis, indicative of close observation of the arterial system, it was thought that Leonardo 's used of animal materials and his attempted to fit them to man which his how he came up with a five-lobed liver. Another characteristic of the period and one which indicates that Leonardo was yet primarily the

Get Access