Leonardo da Vinci and the Vertebral Artery

Carolina Martins

Camila Pimentel Lopes

Antonio Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Martins

This book focus on analysing, grouping, and presenting the historical evidence of Leonardo da Vinci´s knowledge about the Vertebral Artery.

The Vertebral Artery is a complex anatomical structure, supplying vital parts of the human central nervous system. Its modern understanding relies on concepts of basic human anatomy, biomechanics, flow properties and complex tridimensional understanding.

For anyone trying to grasp these concepts either today, in the past, or in the future, a stepwise, gradual, cumulative learning process is required, before a useful conceptual framework of this vessel is undertaken and its applications – in any field of knowledge – comprised.

In true Renaissance tradition, Leonardo da Vinci was an engineer, an architect, a sculptor, and a painter, who acknowledged the importance of human anatomical studies as a means to understand, copy, and build anew, inspired by Nature.

His anatomical notebooks registering anatomical dissections and experiments were meant to be published to teach and educate on the human body and its functioning.

Kept away from study for many years, part of his surviving drawings and complementary notes are nowadays housed at the Royal Collection Trust and have been available to the general public since the first decade of the 21^st century. They contain several pieces of evidence of Leonardo’s anatomical and functional understandings that pertain to the Vertebral Artery.

This book, therefore, departs from a review of Leonardo da Vinci´s historical records, to accomplish an anatomical, biomechanical, and hydraulic analysis of this historical data and how it paved the modern understanding of the Vertebral Artery. It may be of interest to historians, architects, engineers, health professionals, anatomy students, as well as educators and those interested in artistic representations.