Francis C. Wells
2013
The twin peaks of Leonardo’s science both involved bodies – the human body and “the body of the earth”, as he called it. The wonderful drawings of the skeleton and muscles from around 1510, when the artist was in his late 50s and his studies of the heart from 1507 onwards yield to no-one in their acuteness of observation, alertness to function and beauty of representation. His hugely innovatory researches into the vast changes undergone by the body of the earth, culminating in the Codex Leicester of the same period, seem to us to belong to a different scienti fi c discipline. However, as Francis Wells deftly demonstrates, Leonardo was never constrained by what we might think of as separate fi elds of visual enquiry. His dissection of the old man – who claimed to be 100 years old – indicated that the centenarian’s “sweet death” was caused by the enfeebling of his blood supply, which had become tortuous and silted up like meandering rivers.