Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy (for iPad) - Review 2022

Leonardo da Vinci is revered equally one of the greatest artists of all time in addition to being an engineer and an inventor. 1 of his less known efforts is his treatise On the Human Body and its several hundred anatomical illustrations. Between his nifty powers of observation and his infrequent creative skill, he created an oeuvre that would take been groundbreaking at the time (the early on 1500s), only he died before he could publish information technology. This trove of illustrations, which came to be housed in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle in the UK, was largely lost to the world for over 400 years—but no longer. Leonardo da Vinci: Beefcake is an iPad app displaying all 268 pages of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings, in high resolution and with commentary and translated text.

A Masterwork in Content and Production

Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy is a creation of Touch on Printing, whose offerings include several PCMag Editors' Choice apps, including The Pyramids and two rare 5-star iPad apps: The Elements: A Visual Exploration and Molecules by Theodore Gray. Touch Press apps are notable for their design and production quality and their masterful integration of text and graphics, and Leonardo: Beefcake is no exception. Its historical value is incalculable, and it's an easy pick for an Editors' Choice educational iPad app.

Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy is strictly for the iPad, benefitting from the device'south large screen. I tested it on an iPad Air ii running iOS 10.two.

Painter, Inventor, Scientist

The first time you lot launch Leonardo: Anatomy, y'all view an introduction—a short video past Martin Clayton, Senior Curator of Prints and Paintings at the Majestic Library—and so you lot are taken to the Domicile folio. Below the app's title, the folio is split in half, with The Story on the left and The Drawings on the correct. Beneath The Story are links to the app's eleven capacity, stacked side by side to a vertical illustration of a spine, while in a window beneath The Drawings, illustrations from Leonardo'south notebooks slowly cycle, slideshow-style.

The Story is a written account of Leonardo's life and work, with a item focus on his anatomical drawings. The text is lucid and engaging, and the chapters are illustrated mostly with da Vinci paintings and drawings that are not part of the collection, along with the i known portrait of him, painted when da Vinci was nigh threescore. Each chapter ends with a brusque video discussion of the significance of his piece of work by a scholar or physician. As this function of Leonardo's story is relatively unknown, yet vital to the understanding of these particular drawings, I will draw it in some detail here.

Born in 1452, by the age of xx da Vinci had joined the Florentine painters' guild. It wasn't until the mid-1480s that he started his anatomical drawings. By the time he moved to Milan in 1483, his interests had expanded into sculpture, architecture, and military applied science; for the latter, he drew canvas after canvass of novel weapon designs. His interests in science as well blossomed. In add-on to writing almost optics and hydrodynamics, he prepared notes for a theoretical treatise on painting, tackling scientific aspects similar the nature of perspective, shadow, and colors.

By the late 1480s he was doing detailed drawings of the human body, above all to satisfy his own intellectual curiosity and try to understand, for example, the relationship between the mind and the trunk. Eventually he dissected human cadavers (virtually 30 in all), every bit well as those of animals. Information technology was commonly believed that people were divinely created and perfectly proportioned, to mirror the divine form of the universe, an idea passed downward from the Roman architect Vitruvius. Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, which the text describes as the most famous drawing of all time, explores such human proportion in relation to geometrical forms (circumvolve and square).

Leonardo applied his knowledge of perspective and beefcake in preparing his masterwork, The Last Supper . Although the painting itself has faded greatly over the centuries, preparatory drawings prove his intent in portraying the expressions of Christ's disciples after he had informed them that one of them would betray him. Leonardo'due south noesis of the deeper facial structures comes through well-nigh prominently in Judas's expression of guilty shock at Christ's pronouncement.

After a flow of relative inactivity, in which Leonardo left Milan to return to Florence later on his patron was overthrown, he returned to his anatomical drawings, having all just given upwards fine-fine art painting. For about 5 years starting in 1507, they became his prime focus. By 1511 he had clustered a large number of annotated drawings, and his notes indicate that he was nearing the completion of his study of the human body. Merely that year northern Italy was hitting by the plague, and among the dead was his young collaborator, Marcantonio della Torre. Then war drove him into the countryside, and he no longer had a source of corpses for dissection, merely he continued to study animals, oxen in particular, from which he was able to investigate the structure of the heart.

Da Vinci, who died in 1519, never did get to publish his anatomical drawings; the app claims that his treatise "…would accept been by far the well-nigh authentic piece of work on human anatomy published at that fourth dimension…." In 1543, Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica , which became the nearly important piece of work on anatomy always published, appeared in print. At to the lowest degree Leonardo's anatomical illustrations survive, have largely stood the test of time, and are finally getting the attention they are due. The drawings, which take been in the British Royal Collection since at to the lowest degree 1690, were shown in the UK in ii shows in 2022 and 2022, and can be seen now by anyone with an iPad.

The Drawings

When y'all tap on an analogy on the right-hand side of the Home page, you're taken to a page with a set of thumbnails on the correct and a list of topics to the left. You tin view the whole kit and caboodle, all 268 drawings, or choose a particular subject. The topics include time periods (Early works 1485-95, for example), Interactive Drawings (VR illustrations, say of a rotating skull or a chirapsia centre), materials (Metalpoint, Chalk, or Pen and Ink), subjects (Animal Studies), and exhibitions (2012 or 2022). In turn, yous can press a button above the headings titled Body, and view drawings of the body, muscles, organs, vessels, or the skeleton.

Whichever topic you choose, by tapping any of the thumbnails on the right side, you can view the full-screen drawings one by one past swiping to the left. By using buttons effectually the perimeter of each page of drawings, you can view the original, an English language translation (if there is any text), or a mirror image of the text. Da Vinci himself wrote using (reverse) mirror writing, a habit that the app'due south text suggests he adult because he was left-handed. An Information button brings upwards a description of the drawing catalog information for those illustrations that were in the 2022 exhibition. You tin likewise share an analogy on Facebook or Twitter or via electronic mail from a pull-down menu accessible through a Share push button.

The Synthesis of Art and Science

The drawings, though astounding and masterful, are not for everyone. To bask them, it helps to have a stomach for anatomy, every bit many are cutaway views of corpses or human organs. Some illustrations prove nudity, and every bit da Vinci portrayed the human reproductive system, a few are sexually explicit, including a cutaway view of a couple in the midst of intercourse. But artists, people in the medical profession, historians, and anyone interested in the life and work of i of the most extraordinary people ever to walk the Earth—the archetypal Renaissance man—will desire to go Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy. Nowhere else is his synthesis of art and science shown to such good effect, and the app is non but an creative marvel of great historical significance but is also easily worthy of an Editors' Choice.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/ipad-apps/16349/leonardo-da-vinci-anatomy-for-ipad

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