, 1856). They are all of the
same type, scientific, anatomical drawings, and that of Leonardo was
done fifty years before Vesalius! Compare, too, this figure of the
bones of the foot with a similar one from Vesalius.(24) Insatiate
in experiment, intellectually as greedy as Aristotle, painter, poet,
sculptor, engineer, architect, mathematician, chemist, botanist,
aeronaut, musician and withal a dreamer and mystic, full accomplishment
in any one department was not for him! A passionate desire for a mastery
of nature's secrets made him a fierce thing, replete with too much
rage! But for us a record remains--Leonardo was the first of modern
anatomists, and fifty years later, into the breach he made, Vesalius
entered.(25)
(*) This plate was lacking among the author's illustrations, but
the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum remembers his repeatedly
showing special interest in the sketch reproduced in John
Addington Symonds's Life of Michelangelo, London, 1893, Vol. I,
p. 44, and in Charles Singer's Studies in the History and Method
of Science, Oxford, 1917, Vol. I, p. 97, representing Michael
Angelo and a friend dissecting the body of a man, by the light of
a candle fixed in the body itself.
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