Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man (review)

Reviewed by: Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man Monica Azzolini Martin Clayton and Ron Philo. Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010. 160 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-1-60606-020-9). Leonardo da Vinci does not need an introduction, and books about him and his work are abundant. What makes this Renaissance artist so fascinating, no doubt, is the multiplicity of his interests. Anatomy was certainly one of them. Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man is the result of an exhibition that the two editors, Martin Clayton and Ron Philo, held at the Vancouver Art Gallery between February and May of 2010. Martin Clayton, curator of the Royal Collection at Windsor and a fine connoisseur of Leonardo's anatomical drawings, teamed up with anatomist Ron Philo to produce a beautiful annotated edition of Manuscript A, a series of eighteen sheets that contain more than 240 individual anatomical drawings and copious notes. These drawings date to the later phase of Leonardo's career, around 1510-11, and are some of the finest representations of the human body in the entire history of anatomical illustration. The volume opens with a lucid essay by Martin Clayton that sets Manuscript A within the larger context of Leonardo's production, from his early anatomical investigations in the 1480s, to the troubled afterlife of Leonardo's drawings after his death. This essay also serves as an introduction to the rest of the volume, which presents beautiful color plates of Leonardo's sheets accompanied by meticulous anatomical explanations by Philo. Each image is presented twice, first in its original version with Leonardo's mirror-writing annotations, and then with an English translation of Leonardo's notes in place of his handwriting. The translations are literally inserted into the page in place of Leonardo's own notes, and this allows the reader to experience the relation between text and image more fully (even if there are occasions in which Leonardo's notes do not relate directly to the images on the sheet). This undoubtedly makes the book more useful and accessible to [End Page 292] the reader. Less so the accompanying explanatory notes by Philo, unless, that is, one is a physician. There is no doubt that having a real physician and anatomist examine Leonardo's drawings has its benefits: somebody who has practiced dissections and possesses specialized knowledge of the human body could say with more confidence what Leonardo may have drawn from direct observation, and what he may have learned from books and rendered on paper through a process of visualization. Philo's most valuable contributions to this volume are precisely those few lines in the commentary where he draws attention to Leonardo's "'mistakes" and idiosyncrasies and tells his reader if Leonardo was likely to have learned those anatomical concepts from a real dissection or not. The bulk of Philo's notes, however, speaks the language of the modern anatomist, and will therefore remain largely obscure to the average reader. The density of detail and the terminology used to explain the drawings can be followed only by somebody who is well versed in human anatomy. One can certainly sense the excitement of the modern physician at the idea that a man who lived over five hundred years ago could draw the structures of the human body to such a level of perfection, but one would have hoped for more balance and a better sense of what would have best served the readership of such a catalogue. Physicians, no doubt, will find this book exciting; the average reader and the historian of medicine, on the contrary, will find Philo's notes hard going, wishing instead to have had more contextualization of Leonardo's knowledge in relation to his contemporaries. While the beautiful images and the useful English translation inserted in the text undoubtedly make this volume a useful addition to the rich panorama of Leonardiana, the accompanying commentary is somewhat at odds with the primary function of an exhibition catalogue, namely, making Leonardo's drawings more accessible and comprehensible. Physicians and anatomists will love the book, while exhibition goers, art historians, historians of medicine, and teachers will mostly...

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