Author: Stefan Klein Publisher: Da Capo Press ISBN: 0306819031 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Revered today as, perhaps, the greatest of Renaissance painters, Leonardo da Vinci was a scientist at heart. The artist who created the Mona Lisa also designed functioning robots and digital computers, constructed flying machines and built the first heart valve. His intuitive and ingenious approach--a new mode of thinking--linked highly diverse areas of inquiry in startling new ways and ushered in a new era. In Leonardo's Legacy, award-winning science journalist Stefan Klein deciphers the forgotten legacy of this universal genius and persuasively demonstrates that today we have much to learn from Leonardo's way of thinking. Klein sheds light on the mystery behind Leonardo's paintings, takes us through the many facets of his fascination with water, and explains the true significance of his dream of flying. It is a unique glimpse into the complex and brilliant mind of this inventor, scientist, and pioneer of a new world view, with profound consequences for our times.
Author: Jean-Pierre Isbouts Publisher: Apollo Publishers ISBN: 1948062356 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 279
Book Description
For the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death comes an immersive journey through five centuries of history to define the Leonardo mystique and uncover how the elusive Renaissance artist became a global pop icon. Virtually everyone would agree that Leonardo da Vinci was the most important artist of the High Renaissance. It was Leonardo who singlehandedly created the defining features of Western art: a realism based on subtle shading; depth using atmospheric effects; and dramatic contrasts between light and dark. But how did Leonardo, a painter of very few works who died in obscurity in France, become the internationally renowned icon he is today, with the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper the most visited artworks in the world, attracting nearly a billion visitors each year, and Salvator Mundi selling as the most expensive artwork of all time, for nearly half a billion dollars? This extraordinary volume, lavishly illustrated with 130 color images, is the first book to unravel these mysteries by diving deep into the art, literature, science, and politics of Europe from the Renaissance through today. It gives illuminating context to both Leonardo and his accomplishments; explores why Leonardo’s fame vastly overshadowed that of his contemporaries and disciples; and ultimately reveals why despite finishing very few works, his celebrity has survived, even thrived, through five centuries of history.
Author: Trevor J. Fairbrother Publisher: University of Washington Press and Seattle Art Museum ISBN: Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 76
Book Description
Like other notebooks by Leonardo, the manuscript now known as the Codex Leicester was a working record of observations, experiments, and arguments. In it he rendered observations of natural phenomena in words, images, and diagrams. When Microsoft founder Bill Gates purchased the Codex Leicester in 1994, it made headlines around the world; this volume makes Leonardo's notebook accessible to everyone. The Codex Leicester is a product of Leonardo da Vinci's restless intellectual curiosity. By about 1508, when the Renaissance master began to work on this notebook, he had already painted his most acclaimed work, the Mona Lisa, and was working in Milan on the enigmatic Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. Both pictures feature meticulously painted landscape backgrounds that testify to Leonardo's study and scientific understanding of geology, weather, rivers, and mountains -- issues that he pursued in the Codex Leicester. Leonardo Lives explores the close relationship of art and science in Leonardo's work, but it also presents the variety of ways in which he has continued to inspire artists from the 16th century to the present.
Author: David Alan Brown Publisher: Skira ISBN: Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 424
Book Description
The ever increasing art historical attention being paid to the School of Leonardo lies at the root of this volume published almost sixty years after Suida's classic treatment of the subject. This is the first time since then that Lombard art of Leonardesque inspiration has been the object of a systematic analysis embracing a period of around half a century starting from 1490. The essays opening the volume provide an overview dealing with the environment, the organisation and the working practices of Leonardo's atelier and the problems faced by historians, whilst each artist is discussed in a critical profile that, taking into account the most recent academic research, acts a brief but up-to-date monograph.
Author: Andrea Bayer Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art ISBN: 1588391175 Category : Naturalism in art Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
"Largely as a result of Leonardo's innovative work for the Sforza court in Milan, a rich vein of naturalism developed in North Italian art during the late fifteenth century. Questioning the strongly classicizing, idealized style dominant in areas south of the Apennines, artists in the region of Lombardy turned to an investigation of the natural world based on direct observation and adherence to strict visual truth. This heritage of realism continued to be of key importance for more than two hundred years, finding its greatest expression in the art of Caravaggio and eventually influencing the course of Baroque painting throughout Europe. Religious scenes, portraits, and landscapes were all transformed by this new naturalism, which also spurred an interest in still lifes and genre scenes as subjects for paintings. Painters of Reality, titled after an influential exhibition held in Milan more than fifty years ago, is the first study in English of this major aspect of Italian art. Reexamining the subject in light of copious subsequent scholarship, the authors of this volume contribute major essays that define and discuss naturalism as it appeared in both Lombard paintings and drawings. There is also a fresh consideration of the Northern Italian predecessors whose influence is apparent, either directly or indirectly, in the paintings of Caravaggio. More detailed discussions of the subject center on the precise elements that constituted Leonardo's "hypernaturalism"; the important schools of painting that arose in Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, and Milan; and Caravaggio's most notable successors in northern Italy, who kept Lombard realism alive into the eighteenth century. Map, artists' biographies, bibliography, and index are also included" -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.
Author: Ben Lewis Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 1984819267 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
An epic quest exposes hidden truths about Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, the recently discovered masterpiece that sold for $450 million—and might not be the real thing. In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s small oil painting the Salvator Mundi was sold at auction. In the words of its discoverer, the image of Christ as savior of the world is “the rarest thing on the planet.” Its $450 million sale price also makes it the world’s most expensive painting. For two centuries, art dealers had searched in vain for the Holy Grail of art history: a portrait of Christ as the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. Many similar paintings of greatly varying quality had been executed by Leonardo’s assistants in the early sixteenth century. But where was the original by the master himself? In November 2017, Christie’s auction house announced they had it. But did they? The Last Leonardo tells a thrilling tale of a spellbinding icon invested with the power to make or break the reputations of scholars, billionaires, kings, and sheikhs. Ben Lewis takes us to Leonardo’s studio in Renaissance Italy; to the court of Charles I and the English Civil War; to Amsterdam, Moscow, and New Orleans; to the galleries, salerooms, and restorer’s workshop as the painting slowly, painstakingly emerged from obscurity. The vicissitudes of the highly secretive art market are charted across six centuries. It is a twisting tale of geniuses and oligarchs, double-crossings and disappearances, in which we’re never quite certain what to believe. Above all, it is an adventure story about the search for lost treasure, and a quest for the truth. Praise for The Last Leonardo “The story of the world’s most expensive painting is narrated with great gusto and formidably researched detail in Ben Lewis’s book. . . . Lewis’s probings of the Salvator’s backstory raise questions about its historical status and visibility, and these lead in turn to the fundamental question of whether the painting is really an autograph work by Leonardo.”—Charles Nicholl, The Guardian “As the art historian and critic Ben Lewis shows in his forensically detailed and gripping investigation into the history, discovery and sales of the painting, establishing the truth is like nailing down jelly.”— Michael Prodger, The Sunday Times
Author: Francesca Fiorani Publisher: Macmillan + ORM ISBN: 0374715297 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 373
Book Description
“Insightful and beautiful. . . . A wonderful study of how Leonardo’s art and science are interwoven.” —Walter Isaacson, author of Leonardo Da Vinci A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Shortly after Leonardo da Vinci’s death, his peers and rivals created the myth of the two Leonardos: there was Leonardo the artist and then, later in life, Leonardo the scientist. In this pathbreaking biographical interpretation, the art historian Francesca Fiorani tells a very different and much more interesting story. Taking a fresh look at Leonardo’s celebrated but challenging notebooks and other sources, Fiorani shows that Leonardo became fluent in science when he was still young man. As an apprentice in a Florence studio, he was especially interested in the science of optics. He aspired to use this knowledge to capture—as no artist before him had ever done—the interior lives of his subjects, to paint the human soul in its smallest, tenderest motions and vicissitudes. And then he hoped to take one further step: to gather his scientific knowledge together in a book that would be even more important than his paintings. In The Shadow Drawing, Fiorani revises our understanding of Leonardo the artist’s most renowned paintings and reconstructs the wisdom Leonardo the author hoped to impart. The result is both a stirring biography and a bold reconsideration of how the Renaissance understood science and art—and of what was lost when the two were sundered. “Fiorani’s lively intellectual adventure gives us new understanding and appreciation of Leonardo’s cross-fertilization of art and science. It is a perceptive biography of Leonardo exploring the frontiers of science but also a brilliantly informative guide to his paintings.” —Ross King, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome, Leonardo and the Last Supper, and Mad Enchantment
Author: Mark Rosheim Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9783540284406 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 220
Book Description
This book reinterprets Leonardo da Vinci's mechanical design work, revealing a new level of sophistication not recognized by art historians or engineers. The book reinterprets Leonardo's legacy of notes, showing that apparently unconnected fragments from dispersed manuscripts actually comprise cohesive designs for functioning automata. Using the rough sketches scattered throughout almost all of Leonardo's notebooks, the author has reconstructed Leonardo's programmable cart, which was the platform for other automata. Through a readable, lively narrative, the author explains how he reconstructed da Vinci's designs.
Author: Leonard Shlain Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1493015575 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 261
Book Description
Best-selling author Leonard Shlain explores the life, art, and mind of Leonardo da Vinci, seeking to explain his singularity by looking at his achievements in art, science, psychology, and military strategy and then employing state of the art left-right brain scientific research to explain his universal genius. Shlain shows that no other person in human history has excelled in so many different areas as da Vinci and he peels back the layers to explore the how and the why. Shlain asserts that Leonardo’s genius came from a unique creative ability that allowed him to understand and excel in a wide range of fields. From here Shlain jumps off and discusses the history of and current research on human creativity that involves different modes of thinking and neuroscience .The author also boldly speculates on whether or not the qualities of Leonardo’s brain and his creativity presage the future evolution of the human species. Leonardo’s Brain uses da Vinci as a starting point for an exploration of human creativity. With his lucid style, and his remarkable ability to discern connections in a wide range of fields, Shlain brings the reader into the world of history’s greatest mind. .
Author: Stefan Klein
Author: Jean-Pierre Isbouts
Author: C. D. O'Malley
Author: Trevor J. Fairbrother
Author: David Alan Brown
Author: Andrea Bayer
Author: Ben Lewis
Author: Francesca Fiorani
Author: Mark Rosheim
Author: Leonard Shlain