Leonardo da Vinci

Anatomy.
Leonardo has become renowned as a dissecting artist, probing, as legend tells us, the forbidden inner secrets of decaying corpses in the face of what he himself acknowledged as the repellent aspects of under taking 'an anatomy'. Supposedly, this was an illicit and sacrilegious activity, which placed him outside the realms of the church. Late in Leonardo's career in papal Rome, one of the troublesome German technicians denounced his dissections of the Pope, but the drawn and written records of Leonardo's anatomical investigations tell a generally different story. …