Leonardo da Vinci is best known as the great polymath of the High Renaissance, an artistic titan whose expertise in disciplines from optics to geology remains astounding for the time. But Leonardo was also a groundbreaking anatomist. Among the 30,000 pages of his notebooks are anatomical studies that, had they been published in time, might have changed the course of medicine.

Now, 87 of these studies — part of over 550 sheets from Leonardo’s notebooks in the Queen’s Royal Collection at Windsor Castle — are on show at The Queen’s Gallery, at Buckingham Palace in London, from 4 May to 7 October.

In this video Martin Clayton, senior curator of the Royal Collection, discusses Leonardo’s anatomical discoveries through three studies. With the rest — the fruit of research including the dissections of 30 human corpses — these reveal how Leonardo’s unsurpassed sense of form and restless urge to investigate led to key findings such as the working of the aorta.

Clayton’s in-depth article on the studies, ‘Leonardo’s anatomy years’, is published in the Books and Arts section of Nature this week.