Leonardo da Vinci Atlas Anatomicus

Martin Kemp is Emeritus Research Professor in the History of Art at Oxford University and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written and broadcast extensively on imagery in art and science spanning the Renaissance to the present day. He speaks on issues of visualisation and lateral thinking to a wide range of audiences and is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on Leonardo da Vinci, who has been the subject of many of his articles, essays, and books, including Leonardo (Oxford University Press, 2004). Kemp has also published on imagery in the sciences of anatomy, natural history, and optics, as in The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale University Press, 1990). He was trained in Natural Sciences and Art History at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London. From 1993 to 1998 he was Wolfson Research Professor at the British Academy. For more than 25 years he was based in Scotland, at the University of Glasgow and at the University of St. Andrews. Kemp has curated a series of exhibitions on Leonardo as well as on other themes, including Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery in 2000, Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006, and Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now at the Barbican Art Gallery in 2007.

• Editor’s noteAcknowledgements and ThanksPreface with a Very Brief Outlineof the History of the DrawingsIntroductionAnatomy as Natural PhilosophyIn his Own WordsInitial AmbitionsBody and SoulMapping the SurfaceEarly Investigations: Life and Death,the Brain, Nerves, Necks and MusclesThe Foot of a BearBones and BrainsThe Music of ProportionMusclemen“Pen-men”Muscles, Tendons, Ligaments, Bones(and Old Men): the Human MachineRamification and IrrigationThe Brain revisedTongue, Lips and SoundsDiaphragm and Respiration, withThoughts about the Nature of “Spirits”Urinogenital Organs andthe “Mysteries of the Womb”The HeartFurther investigationsIndex of drawings