homwork
Leonardo da Vinci, now 53, has been working on the most recognized and celebrated masterpiece of all time, the Mona Lisa. He will keep working on it and keep it with him until the day he dies. His obsession with both artistic perfection and technical precision leads da Vinci in a surprising direction. He turns his insatiable curiosity to the study of life's greatest work of art—the human body.
"He was interested in anatomy from an early age, probably from his time in Verrocchio's workshop, where artists in Florence were encouraged either to perform dissections, autopsies at a medical school for example, or they were encouraged if not to perform them then at least to observe them."
Always fascinated with the human body, he studies the mysteries of death at the hospitals of Santa Maria Novella.
[Dicono che abbiate vissuto cento anni, è vero? Cento anni, non è così difficile. Non sento dolore, solo stanco, tanto stanco, e terribilmente debole.]
"He is interested in the way that the pieces of the human body—which is after all a very intricate mechanism—the way that the pieces of this mechanism fit together."
Within hours of the old man's death, da Vinci descends into the cavernous morgue to dismantle nature's ultimate machine.
"We might be surprised that Leonardo's, er, dissection of human corpses wasn't frowned on by the church of his time. That seems though to be more of a modern concept, a modern prescription."
Here he will make an astonishing discovery, centuries ahead of his time. "I conducted an autopsy in order to determine the cause of such a peaceful death, and found that it was caused by the failure of blood flowing into the artery that feeds the heart and other lower members which I found withered and shrunk."
In 1507, Leonardo makes history's first description of arteriosclerosis by comparing the circulatory system of the elderly man with that of a child's.
"And we have to try to imagine 500 years ago what it would have been like to * on an autopsy without the benefit of good lighting or good, er, preservation. The material, the smell must have been awful."
Under challenging conditions, Leonardo invents an entirely new way of seeing. Later his cross sections and exploded diagrams will profoundly influence the modern methods of visualizing anatomy and machinery. His code, like the man himself, becomes **. Experimentation continues to be the |
