As part of Universal Leonardo, a series of international exhibitions showing works by Leonardo da Vinci, the Museum of History of Science in Oxford is currently holding Leonardo and the Mathmatical Arts. My most recent work, Leonardo's Great Lady, based on one of Leonardo's anatomical drawings is part of the exhibition which runs until 5th November.
Leonardo's Great Lady
pen and ink on acrylic, 40 x 20 x 80 cm
Marilène Oliver's most recent project has been a collaboration with and cardiac surgeon Francis Wells. They have worked together to deconstruct Leonardo da Vinci's famous anatomical drawing, The Great Lady in order to reconstruct it as a three dimensional sculpture. Wells' anatomical skills and Oliver's experience of making sculptures from MRI scans allow the viewer to enjoy and understand Leonardo's 15 th century insight into the female form from every angle and inside out.
Leonardo's beautiful drawing displays the body as an architectural and structural masterpiece - each organ links to another by a complicated network of veins and arteries. In addition to the complicated entwinement of Leonardo's female anatomy, the drawing is veiled with age - creases in the drawing leave us guessing as to whether some features in the drawing are accidental or intentional. In order to create the sculpture, Leonardo's mysterious diagram was plotted and mapped and then dissected into 80 slices. Using these mapped points, Oliver and Wells worked together to draw 80 axial planes: Leonardo's drawing was translated into the language of radiology. In their work for the sculpture, Oliver and Wells acquired a new and profound understanding of Leonardo's drawing - Leonardo's Great Lady has bovine uterine ligaments and fetal umbilical cords. Although the project answered many questions, it raised new ones - why did Leonardo make these mistakes when he clearly had an accurate understanding of female anatomy? Rather than a diagram of how he saw female anatomy, could The Great Lady be a design for how the female anatomy should be?
a 3D visulisation of the sculpture
KUNSTKORPERLICH - KORPERKUNSTLICH