Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist is a new exhibit at The Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace that is on display through October 7, 2012. 

About the exhibit:

This exhibition is the largest ever of Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of the human body. Leonardo has long been recognised as one of the great artists of the Renaissance, but he was also a pioneer in the understanding of human anatomy. He intended to publish his ground-breaking work in a treatise on anatomy, and had he done so his discoveries would have transformed European knowledge of the subject. But on Leonardo’s death in 1519 the drawings remained a mass of undigested material among his private papers and their significance was effectively lost to the world for almost 400 years. Today they are among the Royal Collection’s greatest treasures.

How revolutionary was his work in anatomy? Some of it could not be conclusively proved until the development of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanners in the 1980s.

If you can’t make it to the exhibit, you can still buy the impressive iPad app designed to accompany it:

The Royal Collection’s iPad app Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy enables users to appreciate fully the astonishing accuracy of Leonardo’s work for the first time. The app includes interactive 3D anatomical models, pinch-zoom functionality and interviews with experts on Leonardo’s work and the history of medicine. It even allows users to reverse and translate the thousands of notes made by the artist in his distinctive mirror-writing, direct from the pages of his notebooks.

The app includes all of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings – 268 pages in total. Over 11 chapters the app tells the story of the greatest challenge Leonardo faced in his career as he embarked upon a campaign of dissection in hospitals and medical schools to investigate the bones, muscles, vessels and organs.