Under the skin.

Wednesday was a NADFAS day so I had a break from the Chinese. The talk was on Leonardo Da Vinci. Always a surprise. The blurb said  something about machines so we had expected cartoons of flying machines, steam cannon, musical instruments, and so on, maybe a little anatomy, but the speaker was a surgeon whose interest in LDV was sparked by his profession. We hadn’t known that in advance. The talk was gruesome in the extreme and, whereas I am hardened by exposure to autopsies on TV, my artist friend is not and is extremely squeamish; something I didn’t know about her. It almost put her to flight. LDV was quite obsessed with what lies under the skin, went to dissections with the enthusiasm of a young Tempe Brennan (TV version). He did a few of his own on executed criminals. It must have been trying having to wipe off the bodily fluids each time he wanted to make a sketch of a section. If he hadn’t cleaned so well we might just have had his DNA. There’s a thought.

J nearly fainted when he explained the reason why LDV found it hard to get a decent cross section of the eye, which collapses like a full bladder once pierced. We got a cursory shot of the Mona Lisa, that beautiful woman with an ermine and the redhead, then it was back to flayed bodies and statues of St. Bartholomew standing nonchalantly with his skin over one arm, as we might carry our raincoat.

Enough!

Maybe it did inspire me. I found in my bookcase one of Kathy Reichs crime novels that I read so long ago I’d almost forgotten.  I had also forgotten how much I need a translator when I read her books. What in the name of all that’s wonderful are ‘Hail Mary passes’? Lateral ones. Used in this instance to describe the large size of a room. What is ‘the Santorini valet’? Santorini is an island. It doesn’t need a valet.

And do I care?

I much prefer the TV incarnation of Temperance Brennan.