Anatomy, Round Two
Cutting down to the heart of it all
The Centenarian
Shortly before he left Florence in 1508, Leonardo was at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, where he struck up a conversation with a man who said he was more than a hundred years old and had never been ill. A few hours later, the old man quietly passed away “without any movement or sign of distress.” Leonardo proceeded to dissect his body, launching what would be, from 1508 to 1513, his second round of anatomical studies.
We should pause to imagine the dandy-dressing Leonardo, now in his mid-fifties and at the height of his fame as a painter, spending his night hours at an old hospital in his neighborhood talking to patients and dissecting bodies. It is another example of his relentless curiosity that would astonish us if we had not become so used to it.
Twenty years earlier, while living in Milan, he had filled notebooks with his first round of anatomy drawings, including beautiful renderings of the human skull. Now he picked up the work again, and on one of the pages, above a set of drawings of muscles and veins in a partially skinned cadaver, he drew a respectful little drawing of his centenarian’s peaceful face, eyes closed, moments after his death. Then, on thirty more pages, he proceeded to record his dissection.
