Leonardo da Vinci - The Anatomist

Art critic Alastair Sooke heads to the new Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at The Queen's Gallery in the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. The show from the Royal Collection will reveal the startling accuracy of the master's anatomical drawings - artwork which lay undiscovered for hundreds of years. They include a series of 18 mostly double-sided sheets known collectively as the Anatomical Manuscript A, on which Leonardo crammed more than 240 meticulous drawings and some 13,000 words of notes in his unmistakeable mirror-writing. These anatomical studies are shown alongside state-of-the art modern medical imagery. Alastair will delve into the sketches and examine the 3D films, CT and MRI scans in order to uncover just how close the Renaissance genius got to the truth of what lies under the skin. The tragedy of Leonardo's anatomical investigations is that he never got around to publishing them. If he had done so, his work could have transformed the history of our medical knowledge.