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The Rhetoric of Sex/ The Discourse of Desire 1. Apples andPears. In the twodozen years between 1488 and 1512, Leonardo da Vinci produced a series of fascinating anatomical drawings that strike the modern viewer as highly realistic and rich with the texture and look of the bodies whose dissections he observed or, no doubt, took part in, as he drew from life—or more accurately, from death—his schemas of the blood vessels, the workings of the heart, the bladder andurinary system, the womb and the fetus inside it.1 These drawings are clearly and carefully observed, detailed, and rich in layerings and representations of tissue texture—and practically useless to a modern anatomist. For aswe look closer, we find there are no atriums or auricles in his depiction of the human heart; rather, he shows a two-chambered affair with only ventricles; and while here and there we can recognize the aorta and the esophagus, aswell as the larger organs, the circulatory system and the alimentary system are depicted in gross form; there are no articulations shown between the stomach and the intestines (mostly absent from his drawings, though not his writings). And in an early anatomic depiction of heterosexual copulation, a "wholly fictitious piece of plumbing" (to use the commentator's term from the 1989 catalogue of the HaywoodGallery da Vinci exhibition in London)2 runs from the man's penis, bypassing the testicles, to the small of the back, where many during the Italian Renaissance believed "theseed of life" wasmanufactured. Indeed, hardly any vessel shown in any of Leonardo's anatomic interiors connects up to what, today, we are fairly certain that it does. And what are we to make of Leonardo's depiction of the womb? For the modern anatomist, the uterus is traditionally described as pearshaped , small end down, and connected by means of the cervix to the vaginal cavity. The pear-shaped bulge at the upper end is largely a product of the entrance into the uterus of the fallopian tubes, which, left and I 4 Shorter Views right, lead back from the outer ends of the ovaries to conduct the egg to the wall of the uterine cavity. Leonardo's womb, however, whether it is engorged with a "four month old fetus" as in the pen and ink drawing with wash over traces of black and red chalk from 1510-12, "The Fetus in the Womb," or whether it is without child, as it is in the 1507 drawing of pen and ink and wash on washed paper, "The Principal Organs and Vascular and Urino-Genital System of a Woman," is as round as an apple. In "The Fetus in the Womb," while an ovary is indeed shown, only the vascular connection about the base is drawn; there is no connection at all from the business end of the ovaries to the womb proper. The fallopian tubes and all the muscular protuberances of the upper end are omitted as tissuey irrelevancies to the womb's presumed perfect, Renaissance sphericality.Nor is this surprising. The assumption of the times was that the material relation obtaining between a man and his offspring wasthat between seed and plant. The relation between a woman and her offspring, however, was that of contiguity , sympathy, resemblance through imposed distortion—of environment to plant. Certainly, people had noticed that a child wasas likely to resemble its mother or people in its mother's family as it was to resemble its father or people in its father's family. But the assumption was that paternal resemblances and maternal resemblances were of two different orders . You resembled your father because you were grown from his seed. You resembled your mother, however,because you spent so much time in her womb that you picked up her traits—because her food had been your food, her pains your pains, her sorrows your sorrows, her soul your soul. In one of the notes on the drawing "The Fetus in the Womb," in da Vinci's famous mirror writing, we find Leonardo's clear expression of the maternal sympathy between the body of the mother and the body of the child: In the case of the child the heart does not beat and . . . breathing is not necessary to it because it receives life and is nourished from the life and food of the mother. And this food nourishes such creatures injust the same wayas it does the other parts of the mother, namely the hands feet...

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