Satire and medicine in Renaissance Florence: Leonardo da Vinci's Grotesque drawings

Leonardo da Vinci's so-called Grotesque drawings have resisted interpretation. Drawn as marginalia, full sheet sketches, and small doodles, comically distorted representations of both men and women make up this small canon, some more exaggerated than others. This thesis examines the relationships between the drawings, Florentine literary satire, and medical discourses in an effort to establish a productive lens for contextualizing these images. A literature review examines the current scholarship on the drawings and what needs to be further addressed. The similarities between the anti-academic, satirical poetry and literature of the Florentine Renaissance and the tropes seen in the Grotesque drawings comprise chapter two. An overview of relevant medical discourses, in particular those treating depictions of old age and the elderly is presented in chapter three.