Almost 500 years after Leonardo da Vinci’s death, technology brings the artist’s ground-breaking studies of the human body to life.

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. Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy has been produced by the Royal Collection in partnership with iPad app publishers Touch Press and leading healthcare publisher Primal Pictures.

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.

Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy is a fantastic way to explore some of the most amazingly detailed and accurate anatomical drawings of all time in the most minute detail. We believe that Leonardo would have been fascinated by modern medical imaging and would have embraced the way in which this app brings his drawings to life.

The app includes the following features:
 

• Enhanced e-book interface.
• All 268 of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings from the Royal Collection, with pinch-zoom functionality at high resolution.
• A mirror spyglass enabling users to read Leonardo’s mirror-writing in the original Italian. 
• Swipe gesture to translate Leonardo’s mirror writing into typeset English text in situ.
• Integrated 3D anatomical models from world-leading medical animators Primal Pictures, carefully matched to Leonardo’s illustrations and made interactive using Touch Press rotational technology.
• Eleven chapters, written by Martin Clayton, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection, telling the story of Leonardo’s anatomical work and presenting over 70 selected works with interactive features.
• Interviews with Martin Clayton and other experts on the significance of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings.
• Full catalogue text for all drawings in the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace (4 May – 7 October 2012).
• Intelligent keyword searching and collection navigation via a human body interface.

Visit the Touch Press website to find out more about the app.

Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy is priced at £9.99 ($13.99) and is available to download via the iTunes App Store.