The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [66]
Possibly the best chance the book had of seeing the light of day came in the year 1510, when Leonardo met a potential collaborator, a highly accomplished young anatomy professor named Marcantonio della Torre. According to a sixteenth-century source who’d heard the details secondhand, the two men agreed to join forces and had divvied up the responsibilities. Marcantonio would organize Leonardo’s extensive but scattered notes and write the text while Leonardo would create the illustrations. Now, whether this collaboration ever really existed remains a matter of debate among Vincian scholars. Leonardo himself never mentions it in his notebooks. Had it come to pass, however, the two might have become the Gray and Carter of the Italian High Renaissance. But Marcantonio died of the plague in 1511, and that was the end of that.
The anatomy notebooks, like the painting of the Mona Lisa, remained in Leonardo’s possession for the rest of his life, and few people ever got a peek at them. Following Leonardo’s death in 1519 at age sixty-seven, the collection became the property of his companion (and possible lover) of the previous dozen years, a young man of twenty-six named Francesco Melzi. Francesco stored the trove at his family’s villa near Milan, where it went virtually untouched for fifty years.
Enter the bad heir.
Upon Francesco’s death in 1570, his nephew inherited the collection and, soon after, allowed the anatomy notebooks to be broken apart and sold off. Over time, an untold number of drawings was lost, some probably destroyed for their heretical nature, but, sometime in the early seventeenth century (the date is undocumented), some somehow became the property of the Royal Library at Windsor, England. Access, however, was limited, if not impossible. It is believed that Charles I himself locked the Leonardo papers in a large chest within the library, where they remained, like objects in a forgotten time capsule, for well over a hundred years.
Then came the hero of this story, Robert Dalton, and what must have been the most extraordinary day of his career as royal librarian.
The exact date is not known, only the year, 1760; George III had just taken the throne. The key to the chest had long been lost by this point, but that did not stop Mr. Dalton from finding some way to pry it open. Perhaps curiosity had simply gotten the best of him, or more likely, he had been roused by the mention of Leonardo’s name in an old library inventory list. Either way, could Mr. Dalton ever have been prepared for what he discovered? At the bottom of the chest was a stack of miracles on paper, 779 drawings in all.
Alerting the king to this great find was not, my gut tells me, Mr. Dalton’s very next move. He surely allowed himself the indulgence of examining each and every drawing. Who could resist? Plus, wouldn’t a careful study fall under his purview as royal librarian? His Majesty would expect nothing less than a full accounting of the collection.
Once informed, George III invited Britain’s leading anatomist, William Hunter, to inspect the drawings. Dr. Hunter, who, along with his brother John, operated an anatomy school right next door to St. George’s Hospital, reportedly told his students that Leonardo’s work was three hundred years ahead of its time. “I expected to see little more than such designs in Anatomy as might be useful to a painter in his own profession,