Leonardo Da Vinci Anatomy Drawings To Go On Show

LEONARDO DA VINCI’S original anatomical drawings are to go on public display for the first time after being hidden away in a leather-bound album for 300 years. Buckingham Palace is to exhibit the astonishing “Leoni binding”, a 16th-century leather album which held da Vinci’s studies of bones, muscles and the heart and brain for three centuries. The master produced the studies between 1489 and 1513. At his death in 1519 he bequeathed the drawings to his assistant whose son sold them to the sculptor Pompeo Leoni. By 1630 the album was owned by Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, who left England in the Civil War. Its existence is next recorded in 1690, when it was seen at Whitehall Palace in London, in the possession of William III and Mary II. It is not known how the album entered the Royal Collection, but it was probably acquired by Charles II during his reign from 1660 to 1685. Curator Martin Clayton said: “For 300 years the binding was effectively the tomb of the drawings.”