The Queen's Gallery

Peter Abrahams, Professor of Clinical Anatomy at Warwick University, explores the value of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings as a tool for understanding the human body, and how closely the artist anticipated the range of imagery used by the medical profession today.

Leonardo is celebrated as both an inspired artist and anatomist. This special event considers how contemporary artists, performers and scientists are informed by each other’s work in their exploration of the human body. Part of the Clod Ensemble’s Performing Medicine programme in collaboration with Wellcome Trust.

Leonardo’s early anatomical studies were intended to help his work as a painter, but his researches took on a life of their own, becoming the most important strand of his scientific work. Exhibition curator Martin Clayton examines the relationship between these two major aspects of Leonardo’s activity.

Photographs of the Middle East taken by royal photographer Francis Bedford, who accompanied the then-Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) on an educational tour of the region in 1862. The royal party travelled through Egypt and the Biblical lands, then known as the Levant, later as Palestine and now as Israel, and almost as…

Thomas Rowlandson was one of the leading caricaturists of the Georgian period, and if his work is more mellow and less pointed than that of his ferocious contemporary James Gillray, it's still no less capable of pointing up folly, gluttony and excess. Rowlandson was also a skilled artist in a realistic vein, and this…

Exhibition focusing on Leonardo's anatomical drawings made during 1510–1511, a period in which he carried out some 20 autopsies at the University of Pavia. The resulting anatomical studies are so accurate that it's thought that if they had been published at the time, European medicine's understanding of the human body…

He is renowned as one of the finest artists of the Renaissance – but Leonardo da Vinci was also one of the greatest anatomists the world has ever seen. Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man explores the artist’s groundbreaking work in anatomy. His studies of the human body are presented alongside state-of-the-art modern…

After the crowds have gone home, let yourself be ‘moved’ by Leonardo’s drawings. This gallery-based course is led by Suzy Willson, Artistic Director of acclaimed performance company Clod Ensemble.