I let my wick burn out--there yet remains
To spread an answering surface to the flame
That others kindle.
But between Mundinus and Vesalius, anatomy had been studied by a group
of men to whom I must, in passing, pay a tribute. The great artists
Raphael, Michael Angelo and Albrecht Durer were keen students of the
human form. There is an anatomical sketch by Michael Angelo in the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which I here reproduce.(*) Durer's famous work
on "Human Proportion," published in 1528, contains excellent figures,
but no sketches of dissections. But greater than any of these, and
antedating them, is Leonardo da Vinci, the one universal genius in
whom the new spirit was incarnate--the Moses who alone among his
contemporaries saw the promised land. How far Leonardo was indebted to
his friend and fellow student, della Torre, at Pavia we do not know,
nor does it matter in face of the indubitable fact that in the
many anatomical sketches from his hand we have the first accurate
representation of the structure of the body. Glance at the three figures
of the spine which I have had photographed side by side, one from
Leonardo, one from Vesalius and the other from Vandyke Carter, who did
the drawings in Gray's "Anatomy" (1st ed.
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