Is Leonardo da Vinci a great artist or a great scientist?

Catalogues at the ready: one show posits Da Vinci as a scientific genius, another as the absolute artist. For him, such divisions were meaningless
Leonardo da Vinci Studies At The Queen's Gallery
The art of curiosity … Leonardo da Vinci studies at the Queen's Gallery. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

There's a row going on down at the Palace. The Royal Collection says Leonardo da Vinci was a scientist. The National Gallery gang say he was an artist. It looks likes curators will soon be hitting one another with catalogues.

Well, not really. But the superb new display of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings at the Royal Collection does offer a different perspective on him from the equally splendid exhibition recently seen at the National Gallery. Where the NG called him a "painter" in its exhibition title and showed off his paintings as never before by securing unprecedented loans, the curator of the Queen's Gallery show argues that in his later life Leonardo saw himself first and foremost as a scientist, and had more or less given up painting. Who is right?

Boringly, they both are. Interestingly, neither is. For Leonardo was a scientist and an artist at the same time and in a way totally unimaginable today. CP Snow's famous image of the "two cultures" of art and science, a great divide in the modern mind, did not apply in the 15th and early 16th centuries when Leonardo lived. The "scientific" knowledge available was barely scientific at all by modern standards. Most of it was inherited from ancient Greece and was a curious mixture of genuine insight, such as the existence of atoms postulated by Democritus, and the superstitious, or mythical, thinking that pervades the Hippocratic Writings. Leonardo was infinitely curious. He taught himself and experimented for himself. He drew inventions and tried to build a flying machine. But he also lived in a late medieval world that allowed him to see analogies between all natural forms: an onion as a model of the human head, a wooden flying machine as a man-made "bird". In other words, his knowledge never got in the way of his imagination.

The anatomical drawings in the Royal Collection are the closest he ever came to modern science. They record his own dissections and are observed so closely and brilliantly that modern doctors can still learn from them. He definitely made real discoveries through sheer observation – the essence of true empirical science. The exhibition makes these discoveries clearer than ever before.

Yet every vein he draws is a miracle of art. He is never more an artist than when he is most a scientist. Even as he patiently reveals the nature of heart valves, he draws with such tender beauty that you gasp at the complex artistic achievement, the subtle textures and three-dimensional illusions, even as you marvel at his insights into the human body. For me, Leonardo's anatomical drawings are both icons of science, and wonders of art.