Following the sellout exhibition at the National Gallery, there is a further chance to see the works
of Leonardo da Vinci as The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, SW1, is showing an exhibition of the artist’s studies of the human body.
Leonardo was an assiduous researcher of the human form, working in hospitals and dissecting bodies, often those of executed criminals. He intended to publish his groundbreaking work, which includes detailed studies of a human skull, a baby in utero and investigations of the heart, but, when he died in 1519, it had become swamped by other work.
His successors at the Court of Milan pasted the papers into albums, which arrived in England in the 17th century, probably acquired by Charles II.
‘Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist’ starts this week, on May 4 (until October 7, 020-7766 7301; www.royalcollection.org.uk).
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