It is hard to imagine that after the publication of Rosa Piro's Glossario Leonardiano there is anything left to do on this subject. So complete is this compendium of terms used by Leonardo in his anatomical studies that we now have a fantastic tool that collects anatomical terms in one place; anyone who knows the historiography of Leonardo scholarship will acknowledge this to be a difficult task and a tremendous accomplishment. Since the early publications of his works by Ravaisson-Mollien and Richter, a single methodology for approaching Leonardo has never been agreed upon, though it has been often debated. Rosa Piro capably attacks this omission by creating a system for placing words, dates, translations, corrections, related words, bibliography, historical correspondences, concordances, and commentary all in the same 604-page volume, making it immensely useful. This system was first developed for the well-planned series of Glossari, directed by the Bibliografia Leonardiana for its Studi e Documenti series, but Piro makes helpful additions. Earlier volumes concern machines from the Codex Madrid and the Codex Atlanticus (Manni, Biffi 2011) and optics from the Institut de France manuscripts (Quaglino 2013).
There are six sections of the book: introduction, criteria used in preparing the glossary, bibliographic abbreviations, glossary, illustrations, and index. The glossary offers not only the vocabulary used by Leonardo in Lombard (translated into Italian), Latin, and common vernacular, but also the location of each entry in the Royal Library sheets, various spellings, and synonyms (new to the glossaries). Piro obligingly notes Leonardo's first use of a term.
While hundreds of books about Leonardo's anatomical studies concern the drawings, sometimes including transcribed descriptions, and others contain glossaries, none have dealt exclusively with the vocabulary. As the author states, thirty years ago “there were few . . . available data on the language of science in the 1300s–1400s and the vocabulary of anatomy was even less studied” (xvii). Although there are many such studies now, particularly regarding medicine before Leonardo, this volume adds to and contextualizes Leonardo's own innovations, beyond the work of the known anatomists Della Torre, Benedetti, Zerbe, and Agnol [Alessandro] listed in his notes.
Leonardo wrestles with naming human parts, not because he lacked an academic or an anatomist background, but because many of them were unstudied and therefore unnamed, making Leonardo's drawings spectacularly novel and useful. Moreover, earlier descriptions were never illustrated, making it nigh impossible to identify part to word without assiduous exploration of the body. It is no wonder that Leonardo had to use vernacular words or coin new ones. This inventory provides the valuable history of the anatomical terms before and after Leonardo. It should be noted that very common words, such as heart, spine, blood (except more specific use), well explicated long before Leonardo, are excluded in an effort to highlight Leonardo's own use of words, and especially new terminology. While scholars have debated the level of Leonardo's literacy in Latin, this catalogue finally proves that he read it well enough to understand Galen's work in translation.
The entries in this Glossario (536 of them in alphabetical order, well outnumbering each of the previous two volumes) clarify, modify, and expand our knowledge of Leonardo's anatomical notes. They also provide a section on dating, new to the Glossari series. The dating derives primarily from Keele and Pedretti's work on the Queen's drawings (1980–84). New intellectual possibilities emerge from the linguistic analysis by fully contextualizing the artist's descriptions.
The organizing principles of the glossary series were defined at the outset, but to put a finer point on the examination of these terms, Professor Piro, specialist in the language of medicine, presents clarifications of technical words, their history, and the original contributions Leonardo made to the study of physiology and anatomy through his acutely observed, remarkable visual descriptions. He is in this way, as in many others, an island unto himself. He enriches the vocabulary, expands pre-Galilean knowledge, and links the past to what is new in modern science. Those who study Leonardo's anatomicals will find in Piro's Glossario a requisite research partner.
