To the North American Review, November, 1902, Edith Wharton contributed a poem on “Vesalius in Zante,” in which she pictures his life, so full of accomplishment, so full of regrets—­regrets accentuated by the receipt of an anatomical treatise by Fallopius, the successor to the chair in Padua!  She makes him say: 

     There are two ways of spreading light; to be
     The candle or the mirror that reflects it. 
     I let my wick burn out—­there yet remains
     To spread an answering surface to the flame
     That others kindle.

But between Mundinus and Vesalius, anatomy had been studied by a group of men to whom I must, in passing, pay a tribute.  The great artists Raphael, Michael Angelo and Albrecht Durer were keen students of the human form.  There is an anatomical sketch by Michael Angelo in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which I here reproduce.(*) Durer’s famous work on “Human Proportion,” published in 1528, contains excellent figures, but no sketches of dissections.  But greater than any of these, and antedating them, is Leonardo da Vinci, the one universal genius in whom the new spirit was incarnate—­the Moses who alone among his contemporaries saw the promised land.  How far Leonardo was indebted to his friend and fellow student, della Torre, at Pavia we do not know, nor does it matter in face of the indubitable fact that in the many anatomical sketches from his hand we have the first accurate representation of the structure of the body.  Glance at the three figures of the spine which I have had photographed side by side, one from Leonardo, one from Vesalius and the other from Vandyke Carter, who did the drawings in Gray’s “Anatomy” (1st ed., 1856).  They are all of the same type, scientific, anatomical drawings, and that of Leonardo was done fifty years before Vesalius!  Compare, too, this figure of the bones of the foot with a similar one from Vesalius.(24) Insatiate in experiment, intellectually as greedy as Aristotle, painter, poet, sculptor, engineer, architect, mathematician, chemist, botanist, aeronaut, musician and withal a dreamer and mystic, full accomplishment in any one department was not for him!  A passionate desire for a mastery of nature’s secrets made him a fierce thing, replete with too much rage!  But for us a record remains—­Leonardo was the first of modern anatomists, and fifty years later, into the breach he made, Vesalius entered.(25)

(*) This plate was lacking among the author’s illustrations, but the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum remembers his repeatedly showing special interest in the sketch reproduced in John Addington Symonds’s Life of Michelangelo, London, 1893, Vol.  I, p. 44, and in Charles Singer’s Studies in the History and Method of Science, Oxford, 1917, Vol.  I, p. 97, representing Michael Angelo and a friend dissecting the body of a man, by the light of a candle fixed in the body itself.—­Ed.

     (24) He was the first to make and represent anatomical cross
     sections.  See Leonardo:  Quaderni d’Anatomia, Jacob Dybwad,
     Kristiania, 1911-1916, Vol.  V.