Page 244 of DATE
"An... anatomy diagram?!" Michelangelo instinctively flipped through two pages, realizing that it was indeed a manuscript illustrating the dissection of the human body.
He instinctively wanted to throw away such a devilish thing but, as a painter, his professional habit couldn't stop him from glancing at a few more pages.
There were depictions of tendon breakdowns, as well as detailed muscle breakdowns of fingers and elbows…
No... I can’t look at this…
But it’s no wonder Mr. Da Vinci knows so much about the muscles around the neck. So this is what it looks like when this area is opened up...
Leonardo watched as the young man’s face alternated between pale and flushed, unable to hold back a chuckle.
"By the way," he raised his finger and suggested, "next time we have some free time, we should dissect a body together. I still don’t fully understand the muscles around the thigh."
Botticelli glanced at him with a look of indifference, then turned to Raphael. "You didn’t hear anything."
Little Raphael nodded honestly. "I didn’t hear anything."
So, Da Vinci really did bring back a corpse once again.
Since the genius had spent the past two years designing the cathedral in Milan, the desolate wild cemetery had becomerather crowded, with rumors that all sorts of bodies—of various ages and physiques—could be found.
Michelangelo, with a complicated expression, followed Da Vinci as they left the Doge's Palace in a carriage. By the time they returned, he was almost on the verge of tears.
Hedy, understanding his discomfort, patted him on the shoulder. He even tried to shy away from her touch.
"Master, if you knew what I’ve touched," Michelangelo said with red eyes, "you’d probably never want to come near me again."
Such an act—was nothing short of sacrilege!
Hedy blinked, and Botticelli, who was helping to carry the shrouded body, casually remarked, "She’s an alchemist. She’s legally allowed to handle such things."
The young man was stunned for a moment. "You mean—?"
"Most of Leonardo’s anatomical knowledge came from her. What do you think?"
Michelangelo, like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, sprang away, not daring to look at her again.
Though he verbally rejected and resisted, once it came to the dissection, the artists surprisingly entered into the process with a shared enthusiasm.
Hedy handed Raphael a glass of orange juice and asked him to help her sketch the shape of the grapevine diseased branches. Then, she sent Dechio to watch over the children while she went down to the underground ventilation chamber to assist them.
The strictness and attention to detail that artists have for certain aspects of their work are things that outsiders often fail to understand.
No one understood this more than Hedy.
When Da Vinci once took an order for a portrait of a noblewoman, he designed everything from her facial contour to her hair and eye color with great precision. However, theprocess dragged on for almost four or five months, and he even considered abandoning the piece altogether at one point.
The reason sounded somewhat laughable—
He didn’t know how to depict the necklace that fell across her neck.
Such a small detail might seem like something that could be done casually, but Da Vinci, in his typical fashion, went so far as to bring in several books on mathematics to perform complex curve calculations to figure out how to accurately portray the necklace’s fall.
Hedy had long given up on the grand idea of having more famous paintings in the Louvre and simply gifted him a similar necklace so that he could spend an entire afternoon in the studio examining it.
Now, the four of them were together in the dissection room. While they all gagged to varying degrees due to the smell or appearance of the body, none of them wanted to leave.
The three artists were, of course, filled with countless questions in their minds. They could easily spend the whole afternoon and evening studying a single muscle of the thigh.
