Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist, The Queen's Gallery, review We think of Leonardo as a painter, but for the majority of his life he behaved more like a scientist - studying the properties of water, endeavouring to understand the secrets of flight, designing robots, and so on. And the scientific field in which he most excelled was that of human anatomy. The story of what happened to Leonardo's papers after his death is complicated but crucial. Despite intending to publish several pioneering treatises, Leonardo never got around to ordering his miscellaneous manuscripts - and neither did Melzi. Towards the end of the 16th century, the sculptor Pompeo Leoni bought a load of Leonardo's papers from Melzi's son, and carved them up (sometimes literally) into different albums - including one, consisting of about 600 sheets, which ended up in Windsor Castle. Approximately a quarter of the manuscripts in the Royal Collection are anatomical studies, and these represent almost all of Leonardo's surviving drawings on the subject. There have been exhibitions of Leonardo's studies of the human body in the past, including one at the Royal Academy in 1977. But the new exhibition at the Queen's Gallery is the most extensive yet. Showcasing almost 90 drawings, immaculately arranged by the rigorous scholar Martin Clayton, it is also the first to present the complex evolution of Leonardo's thinking on the subject in a chronological fashion, from his first forays into the field during the 1480s to his spellbinding studies of the workings of the heart from 1511-13, which continue to astound cardiac surgeons to this day. In other words, this is the most complete display of anatomical drawings by Leonardo that we are ever likely to get. The first gallery presents the early glimmerings of Leonardo's interest in anatomy. A series of drawings from the middle of the 1480s suggests that, to begin with, his knowledge was based not on first-hand observation, but on speculative classical literature stretching back to Galen and Aristotle. The first breakthrough, though, came at the end of the decade, when Leonardo inscribed a new notebook with the words "On the 2nd day of April 1489," later adding "Book entitled On the Human Figure," and began a number of brilliantly observed studies of the human skull. After this impressive start, though, his anatomical investigations went into abeyance for a decade or so. As we see in the second gallery, he returned to the subject after 1503, when he was commissioned to create an enormous mural of the Battle of Anghiari in the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. An enhanced understanding of anatomical structures probably helped him plan its intricate composition, which was never completed (it was subsequently painted over). Another breakthrough occurred in the winter of 1507-8, when he dissected a man who was more than 100 years old. In the final gallery, we see a set of often double-sided sheets filled with worked-up drawings of bones and muscles. These date from the winter of 1510-11, when Leonardo was close to finishing his book On the Human Figure that he had begun two decades earlier. By this stage, he was probably collaborating with the anatomy professor Marcantonio della Torre in the medical school of the university of Pavia, 20 miles south of Milan, which would have given him a ready source of cadavers for dissection. By the end of his life, he boasted that he had anatomised more than 30 corpses. Elsewhere in the final gallery, we see Leonardo's famous drawings of a coiled foetus in the womb (for the first time in his anatomical illustrations, he uses colour - red chalk - to delineate this cramped bundle of human potential), as well as his peerlessly accurate studies of ox hearts. In experiments and sketches from circa 1512-13, Leonardo examined the flow of blood through the aortic valve, gleaning insights that would not be observed again for 400 years. I cannot pretend for one second that I fathomed even a fraction of Leonardo's scientific achievements - his analytical mind was far too advanced for an arts-fuddled brain like mine. That said, his complex yet lucid drawings, surrounded by precise left-handed notes written using his habitual right-to-left "mirror script," are obviously close to perfection. From an aesthetic point of view, Leonardo's draughtsmanship is breathtaking. In technical terms, the way he depicted the human body - mobilising cross-section and the engineering device of the "exploded view" - was far ahead of his time. Examining these manuscripts also affords an irresistible sense of proximity to a great mind. Every sheet jostles and teems with reflections, ideas and observations - the fossilised remains of someone's synapses firing on all cylinders half a millennium ago. Ever the disciple of experience, Leonardo refused to follow slavishly the flyblown teachings of the ancients. Instead, his restless, questing spirit demanded that he observe things for himself - which meant overcoming any aversion to cutting up cadavers, which in those days was a much sloppier and more disgusting business than it is today. In this respect, Leonardo offers a paradigm of the profound shift that occurred during the Renaissance, from a medieval mindset to a modern sensibility. There is something very poignant about this exhibition, too. Had he published the treatise on anatomy that he'd planned, Leonardo would be considered one of the great scientists of the Renaissance - if not all time. But because he never managed to do so, his anatomical drawings essentially disappeared from view for hundreds of years - which meant that they had little impact on scientists of a later age. What a curious thing: to dominate a field so thoroughly, and yet for the fruits of your research to wither into oblivion for almost four centuries, before blooming back to life. From Fri until Oct 7.