The anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci are generally admired for their analytical character and graphical precision, or are studied from the perspective of the scientific discoveries which the artist made in a strictly anatomical context, or in those of pathological investigation. They may also be viewed in the light of contemporary knowledge and ideas without considering the full value and the novelty of their intended visualization. In this volume, centred on the contexts and methods of visualization, Paola Salvi looks at the theory and practice of the visual arts as the foundation of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings. which become a scientific contribution since their intention was to make visible the human body in all its parts, by means of the selection and `reconstructive’ imagery of the drawings. Direct observation and the communicative value of visual language replace the tedious and scarcely useful verbal descriptions of anatomical texts of the time, leading the artist to the programmatic synthesis expressed around 1510: "Therefore it is necessary to make a drawing of it as well as to describe it". This volume therefore becomes not only a reinterpretation and a more conscious placement of the anatomical work of Leonardo in the context of the knowledge of the time, but is also the basis of a new historical framework for artistic anatomy and, above all, for the anatomical iconography which finds models of reconstruction which have come into their own right, in the works of Leonardo.

Carlo Pedretti, who writes the foreword, defines the book as,"an enterprise that requires courage and the ability to conduct a rigourous interpretive synthesis, qualities that once again I can not help but recognise in Paola Salvi".

This is the Italian language edition.