CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/5/2019

The anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, published upon the quincentennial of his death

More than 500 years ago Leonardo da Vinci produced a body of astonishing anatomical drawings, heavily annotated with his own methodical observations. Remarkably precise, nuanced and delicate, yet scientifically searching, these drawings remain fundamental to our understanding of the artist and his uninhibited search for knowledge. This image, depicting the layers of the scalp and cerebral ventricles, is reproduced from the Royal Academy's fascinating new study, Leonardo da Vinci: Under the Skin, published on the five-hundredth anniversary of the artist's death. "Probably made in three distinct layers, this tonal line drawing uses two very different weights of line to differentiate, in an essentially diagrammatic rendering, what for Leonardo was primary and secondary information," Stephen and Michael Farthing write. "In the first layer, he will have mapped out the full image in red chalk. In the second he will have given focus through a more precise and emphatic ink overdrawing that leaves the un-inked areas to be read as secondary information. Then in the final layer, he uses both image and text to introduce the sectioned onion as an object for comparison. By giving the drawings a very specific weighting that casts the cerebral ventricles at its center as secondary information, he allows what is essentially the frame—his comparison of the layers of the scalp to an onion—to become the focus."