Sezione I Sezione II Sezione III Sezione IV Sezione V Sezione VI Sezione VII
The Mind of Leonardo
VII.3
 
VII.3
Leonardo da Vinci
Drawing of Michelangelo's David
Windsor Castle, The Royal Collection, 12591
 
  [VII.3  The Herculean figure, between anatomy and physiognomy]    
 
     

In the years when he was working on the Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo studied the way in which the muscles generate force. He discovered that the heart is a muscle, and that force is thus necessary to maintain life.

Contemporaneously he studied, from the viewpoint of physiognomy, the choleric human temperament, whose salient characteristics are remarkable strength and a particular constitution of the heart. For Leonardo the hot-tempered man has a leonine appearance. A series of Herculean figures, reminiscent of the ones in the Battle of Anghiari, represent the artistic side of this research, midway between anatomy and physiognomy. In this way Leonardo elaborated a complex, original response to the stimuli coming from the cultural climate then prevailing in Florence, where Michelangelo was creating figures of heroic beauty (such as the David), while devoting himself to intense anatomical dissections.


 
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