The first academic commentary on Leonardo’s anatomical manuscripts was that of the eminent eighteenth century anatomist William Hunter. His comments on the newly discovered manuscripts are the first of the new world of science. The manuscripts and drawings were found in the possession of King George III, whose Royal Librarian, Richard Dalton, rediscovered them and showed them to Hunter. Hunter was deeply impressed. In his “Foundation Lectures on Anatomy”, Hunter wrote, “Leonardo must have been the foremost anatomist of that time.”¹ He planned to publish the manuscripts with his own commentary, but he died in 1783 before he could undertake the task.

Further scholarship had slow beginnings. The first selection of published drawings was by John Chamberlaine in his “Imitations of Original Designs by Leonardo da Vinci”, which contained only a few anatomical drawings. Gaetano Milanesi (1872) and Gustavo Uzielle in the same year began to study them. J.P. Richter undertook the first thorough study of the anatomy.

The first attempts to disseminate the anatomical drawings to a wider audience came about through the efforts of Theodore Sabachnikoff. He published a selection of the drawings in 1898 under the title of Dell’ Anatomia, Fogli A. The introduction to this volume was written by a professor of anatomy at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, Mathias Duval. It contained transcriptions of Leonardo’s text accompanied by translation into French. In 1901, a second volume (Fogli B) was published. This work contains numerous errors in translation and transcription as well as in anatomical understanding and in knowledge of the history of anatomy.

Sabachnikoff continued to photograph the remaining drawings and had deposited the negatives with Édouard Rouveyre, his Paris publisher. Rouveyre betrayed Sabachnikoff, however, and published these remaining drawings before Sabachnikoff had completed the transcriptions and translation of Leonardo’s remaining text. It is said that this unethical behaviour brought about Sabachnikoff’s premature death. It certainly conspired to undermine the work, which was left in need of completion.

In 1911 and 1916, there appeared the significant publication in Oslo of the Quaderni d’Anatomia. This came about through the efforts of C.L. Vangensten, A. Fonahn, and H. Hopstock. It contains a full Italian transcription and translation into English and German. The facsimiles were beautifully made, but the translations are somewhat inaccurate. The various volumes were made up by the grouping of related subjects, so they are not in chronological order.

In 1930, J. Playfair McMurrich (Professor of Anatomy at the University of Toronto) published his book, Leonardo da Vinci, The Anatomist. The author of the preface to that book, George Sarton, noted that real scholarship of the anatomy of Leonardo could only be brought to bear by someone academically familiar with the subject, a theoretical knowledge alone not being enough. This observation is certainly true, and it has become ever more obvious to me that those attributes alone may not be enough to deal adequately with the expansive horizons of Leonardo’s objectivity and purity of observation. He recorded truthfully his observations and deductions, which very often were ahead of the accepted knowledge of his time. The McMurrich book was the first to begin to systematise the discussion of Leonardo’s anatomy.