The leg muscles and bones of man and horse

The muscles of a man’s legs are here studied in several views, together with the bones of the pelvis and legs, with ‘cords’ indicating the lines of action of the muscles. At lower centre is a diagram of the same structures in the horse, with the astute note that ‘to match the bone structure of a horse with that of a man you will have to draw the man on tip-toe’. Leonardo had first studied anatomy in the late 1480s, and he returned to the subject around 1506. By the end of his life he claimed to have performed 30 human dissections. He intended to publish an illustrated treatise on the subject, but this was never completed, and the work of one of the great anatomists of the Renaissance thus had no discernible impact on the discipline. Text adapted from Leonardo da Vinci: A life in drawing, London, 2018