Beyond the Skin's Frontier

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Met displays Leonardo's revolutionary anatomical drawings

The current exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings at New York City's Metropolitan Museum is, one need hardly point out, a must for almost anyone who is interested in either drawings or bodies. All the same, it is not the easiest of shows. Its predecessor, the Met's 1981 exhibition of his studies of landscape and water and plants (lent, like this one, from the Royal Library at Windsor Castle), was more open to the nonspecialist, if only because more people have mused on water currents or leaves than on the maxillary sinus or the epigastric veins of the abdomen. Nevertheless, anything by Leonardo, especially a group of studies as important in his work as this, is bound to be an object of fascination.

Once again, one is confronted by that angelically ranging mind, that steely eye and that infinitely skilled hand. And though the short catalogue, by Leonardo Experts Carlo Pedretti and Kenneth Keele, can do no more than touch on the scientific and aesthetic ramifications of Leonardo's work as anatomist, it is still a useful introduction.

Leonardo dissected bodies and drew what he found for two reasons. He wanted to systematize the scientific study of anatomy at a time--the late 15th century--when the human skin was the frontier of unknown territory. He also wanted to deepen his understanding of the muscular frame, whose shapes determine the figure and are the key to proportion and beauty. Nowhere in his work do the scientific and aesthetic impulses twine more closely. But they grew under the shadow of disgust, and to appreciate these drawings one must grasp the difficulty of making them. The anatomist had no preservatives except alcohol and, of course, no refrigeration. For some of his deeper and more complex dissections, Leonardo would have had to spend a week or more with his nose in an open cadaver under conditions that would drive anyone else gagging from the room. No doubt he worked mostly in winter. Even so, it was dreadful work for a man of his fastidiousness, and he dryly noted in an aside to would-be anatomists, "You may perhaps be deterred by natural repugnance, or ... by the fear of passing the night hours in the company of these corpses, quartered and flayed, and horrible to behold."

It was hard to find bodies to work on; not only popular feeling but religion was against it. The main sources were the scaffold and the derelicts' hospital. Most of the people were old, emaciated men who died alone; his observations of women were sometimes the merest guesswork. An extreme case is a drawing in this show of the female genitalia, which are represented as an absence, a mere cave, without even primary features. It may be that Leonardo, a homosexual with a pronounced distaste for any kind of sexual act, could not bring himself to look at a vagina. "The act of coitus and the parts employed therein," he wrote on another sheet, "are so repulsive that were it not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the frenetic state of mind, nature would lose the human species."

But sexuality was the only area where Leonardo's aversions interfered with his quest for knowledge. His unrelenting discipline in observation bore immense fruit.

His anatomical studies, taken as a whole, represent the greatest leap in knowledge of the body made by any man in history, until Vesalius published his epochal De Humani Carporis Fabrica in 1543, nearly a quarter-century after Leonardo's death. Indeed, many of the artist's discoveries would not be rediscovered until well into the 18th century. What medical history might have been if most of Leonardo's notebooks had not been scattered or lost one can only guess.

It is clear from the surviving sheets that he was the first to study physiology as a whole system, a mechanism of bone and tissue working in accordance with discoverable laws, all parts interacting.

Only by thinking of the body literally as a soft machine was he able to clarify its functions and see what processes were veiled by "the very great confusion" one saw on peeling back the skin: "the mixture of membranes with veins, arteries, nerves, tendons, muscles, bones, and the blood that itself tinges every part with the same color." Only drawing, the ordering of sight, could make sense of this Galenic shambles whose mysteries had kept the human innards in the dark since antiquity.

It was Leonardo's incomparable power of abstraction, combined with his powerful eye for detail (how does one see what is not yet named?), that made him a great anatomist. Both always coexist in the drawings, but their proportion varies.

Some of the works are as schematic as engineering diagrams. Others, including his famous study of two skulls cut across their cranial vaults, are done with an exquisite realism of tone and shading that rivals the most delicate passage in his studies of inanimate nature. Others still, like the wonderfully plastic red chalk drawing of a naked man seen from the back, can hardly be distinguished in aesthetic intention from his figure drawings for paintings. In short, what drawing conveys is never subordinated to style, even in the work of this most consummate of graphic stylists.

Sight, he wrote, is the queen of the senses, and nothing could be allowed to get in her way. --By Robert Hughes