Da Vinci’s anatomy studies to go on show

PREPARATIONS are under way to stage the first display of Leonardo da Vinci’s Leoni binding – the 16th-century leather album which for more than 300 years held the most remarkable anatomical drawings ever produced.

Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist opens on 4 May at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, and will be the largest-ever exhibition of his groundbreaking studies of the human body.

Had Da Vinci’s drawings been published, they would have transformed European knowledge of anatomy. Instead they remained within the covers of the album, effectively lost to the world until the 20th century.

Exhibition curator Martin Clayton said: “The Leoni binding is a hugely important part of the 500-year story of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings.

“For 300 years the binding was effectively the tomb of the drawings.

“It kept them together, and in wonderful condition, but it also ensured that they were not circulated or published.”

Long recognised as one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, the exhibition will reveal Leonardo to be also one of the most original and perceptive anatomists of his or any other time.

Between 1489 and 1513, the master produced detailed studies of bones, muscles and internal organs, including the heart and the brain.

He intended to publish his studies in a treatise on anatomy, but when he died in 1519 his anatomical research remained among his private papers, a mass of undigested and disorganised material.

Da Vinci bequeathed his notebooks and drawings to his young assistant, Francesco Melzi.

Melzi died around 1570, and by 1590 his son had sold the Da Vinci papers to the sculptor Pompeo Leoni.

It was Leoni who had the anatomical drawings bound together in an album.