Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks:

Studies of the foetus in the womb, circa 1510-13

• Leonardo’s Christ-child on his mother’s knee
• is muscular, self-aware and in control:
• an infant God. From Leda’s swan-eggs roll
• writhing lightning-bolts of energy.


• But here, amid laboratory mess and stink,
• the artist sees a scientific duty:
• this seven-month foetus he preserves in ink
• drawn, with a quill gleaned from archangel wings,
• in the s-curves Hogarth calls ‘the line of beauty’;
• he feathers volume in with delicate rings
• on smudges of chalk. The minimus droops its head.
• The cotyledon, unwatered and unfed,
• in its Fabergé-chestnut-husk must atrophy:
• its paper image lays hold on eternity.

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