In his intriguing prologue to this beautiful and desirable book, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, remarks that Renaissance theorists valued drawing as the thinking part of art. In some of the lovely drawings reproduced, and elegantly critiqued by a Professor of Drawing and Professor of Medicine, included in it you can almost hear Leonardo thinking.
As an anatomist and chronicler of the structure of the human body, he is peerless — ‘impeccable’ barely does justice to his depiction of The Superficial Anatomy of the Shoulder and Neck or The Vertebral Column — a first in medical history, which has not been improved on significantly since — but the deeper he gets, under the skin, the less sure his touch, the …