Academia Nacional Superior de Orquestra

The art of the Italian Renaissance represents a return to the classic ideal of mimesis. Based on rigorous and complex models of universal representation, such as perspective, the images had an 'emotional vitality' that did not exist in medieval representations. These artists had a desire to know in depth that would lead, some of them, to dissect the human body, giving rise to the visual culture of medicine. Seeing and showing the inside of the body through the theory of art has decisively revolutionized the ways of thinking and representing body identity. One of the pioneers of this revolution is an artist, Leonardo da Vinci. His anatomical drawings, of great accuracy and graphic beauty, were the first scientific images of the interior of the human body. Devoid of allegories or other modes of expression, usually used by artists in their representation strategies, Leonaardo’s anatomical drawings show the visual reality of the body. Not only the reality of the body as a thing, a corpse, but also the reality of the living body in action, whose dynamics he portrays exemplarily through the drawings of movement sequences, in which anatomy is linked to physiology, an animate anatomy that only later, in the century XVII, would begin to develop. This article reproduces the text and the imges of the conference that the author gave at the colloquium “Leonardo da Vinci’s genius in the 500th anniversary of his death at the Lisbon Science Academy, on the 4th of June 2019.