Though Leonardo was most interested in the functions of the human heart, his most famous heart dissections were of pigs’ because they are very similar to human hearts and they are far easier to come by. Like Leonardo we obtained a pig’s heart, though ours was from a biological supplier rather than a butcher and ours was preserved for the purpose of dissection while the heart he dealt with probably began to rot soon after he obtained it. We tried to conduct our dissection with as much historical accuracy as possible so we used a similarly sized pig’s heart and comparable cutting and probing instruments.

We studied Leonardo’s sketches of his dissection in order to find what axes he cut on and how he carried out his dissections. He sketches several different cutting schemes, which makes it likely that he conducted more than one dissection, but his most common axis was basically vertical. For this reason we approached our dissection on a vertical axis first cutting a sliver, then halving the heart, then quartering it. We tried to come as close to the viewpoints in his sketches as we could. However, even with basic knowledge of how the heart works and the approximate placement of chambers, valves, and arteries, it was difficult to discern exactly what we were looking at. We, and in all likelihood Leonardo as well, were left staring, slightly perplexed, at a mass of muscle and connecting tubes. The dissection proved to be an interesting if slightly confusing exercise. It is no wonder that Leonardo was so intrigued by the heart or that he wanted to do more than one dissection to address his still unanswered questions about the cardiovascular system.