Leonardo & the Human Machine

Five centuries ago, a man with no formal medical training produced anatomical drawings so advanced that modern surgeons still reference them today.

“A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.”
— Leonardo da Vinci

Tucked into thousands of pages of his notebooks and buried in mirror-script, scattered across studies of flying machines and hydraulic systems — are some of the most precise, beautiful, and scientifically insightful anatomical drawings ever created.

This is the story of how one ma…