Download or read book Da Vinci s Lost Years written by Sylvia Rochester and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever wonder how Da Vinci could conjure up such futuristic concepts? Maybe he saw them. After striking a bargain with the Old One, a weaver of time, young Leonardo lands in 1969 New Orleans at the height of Mardi Gras. But things go awry when this medieval man befriends an unlikely couple--T-Man, an inept artist who moonlights as a bag man for the mob, and Monique, an amputee, grateful for T-Man's attention. Throw in murder and romance and you're set for an adventurous romp through history.
Download or read book The Last Leonardo written by Ben Lewis and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book DaVinci s Lost Years written by Sylvia Rochester and published by Whiskey Creek Press. This book was released on 2010-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever wonder how Da Vinci could conjure up such futuristic concepts? Maybe he saw them. After striking a bargain with the Old One, a weaver of time, young Leonardo lands in 1969 New Orleans at the height of Mardi Gras. But things go awry when this medieval man befriends an unlikely couple--T-Man, an inept artist who moonlights as a bag man for the mob, and Monique, an amputee, grateful for T-Man's attention. Throw in murder and romance and you're set for an adventurous romp through history.
Download or read book Leonardo s Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts written by Martin Kemp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Salvator Mundi is the first Leonardo painting to be discovered for over a century. Following its re-emergence, it played a leading role in the landmark Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery in London in 2011, after which it was purchased by a Russian oligarch. In 2017 it was auctioned by Christie's in New York, fetching the world record price of $450m, and now forms part of the collection of Louvre Abu Dhabi. The Salvator Mundi may be seen as the devotional counterpart to the Mona Lisa, having an extraordinary, communicative presence. The artist has reformed the very traditional subject matter in a number of ways. The elusiveness of Christ's expression suggests his spiritual origins beyond the world of the senses. The traditional sphere of the earth has been transformed into a rock-crystal orb and signifies a crystalline sphere of the heavens. In addition to its spiritual dimension, the image exploits Leonardo's optical knowledge and his growing sense of the illusiveness of seeing. Only the blessing hand is in reasonably sharp focus, with his features softly veiled. The scintillating curls of his hair are characterised in line with his theory that the physics of the curling of hair is analogous to vortex motion in water. This book looks at evidence of Leonardo's Salvator Mundi in the collections of Charles I and Charles II. It explores the appraisal of works by Leonardo at the Stuart courts, and proposes that how works attributed to Leonardo were first encountered and understood in seventeenth-century Britain would shape the wider evolution of Leonardo as a cultural icon. This volume gives a dramatic first-hand account of the modern-day discovery of the painting, from its purchase in a minor New Orleans auction house, to the cleaning of the picture that would disclose it as Leonardo's startling original, and the research processes that would uncover illustrious and obscure former owners. The book presents the definitive study of the new masterpiece.
Download or read book The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci written by Leonardo da Vinci and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-07-12 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 1 of 2-volume set. Total of 1,566 extracts includes writings on painting, sculpture, architecture, anatomy, mining, inventions, and music. Dual Italian-English texts, with 186 plates plus over 500 additional drawings.
Download or read book Lives of Leonardo written by Bandello VASARI and published by Pallas Athene. This book was released on 2019-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many people the greatest artist, and the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, theatre designer, engineer, sculptor, anatomist, geometer, naturalist, poet and musician. His Last Supper in Milan has been called the greatest painting in Western art. Illegitimate, left-handed and homosexual, Leonardo never made a straightforward career. But from his earliest apprenticeship with the Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea Verrochio, his astonishing gifts were recognised. His life led him from Florence to militaristic Milan and back, to Rome and eventually to France, where he died in the arms of the King, Francis I. As one of the greatest exponents of painting of his time, Leonardo was celebrated by his fellow Florentine Vasari (who was nevertheless responsible for covering over the great fresco of the Battle of Anghiari with his own painting). Vasari's carefully researched life of Leonardo remains one of the main sources of our knowledge, and is printed here together with the three other early biographies, and the major account by his French editor Du Fresne. Personal reminiscences by the novelist Bandello, and humanist Saba di Castiglione, round out the picture, and for the first time the extremely revealing imagined dialogue between Leonardo and the Greek sculptor Phidias, by the painter and theorist Lomazzo, is published in English. An introduction by the scholar Charles Robertson places these writings and the career of Leonardo in context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations, including the major paintings and many of the astonishing drawings, give a rich overview of Leonardo's work and mind.
Download or read book Leonardo da Vinci written by Walter Isaacson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestseller from Walter Isaacson brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography that is “a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it…Most important, it is a powerful story of an exhilarating mind and life” (The New Yorker). Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson “deftly reveals an intimate Leonardo” (San Francisco Chronicle) in a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius. In the “luminous” (Daily Beast) Leonardo da Vinci, Isaacson describes how Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance to be imaginative and, like talented rebels in any era, to think different. Here, da Vinci “comes to life in all his remarkable brilliance and oddity in Walter Isaacson’s ambitious new biography…a vigorous, insightful portrait” (The Washington Post).
Download or read book Leonardo s Lost Robots written by Mark Rosheim and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-06-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Day the Renaissance Was Saved written by Niccolo Capponi and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a battle that change the course of history, and was immortalized in a massive painting by Leonardo da Vinci that was thought lost for centuries . . . until now. On a sweltering day in June 1440, near the Tuscan town of Anghiari, the simmering conflict among Italy’s principal powers exploded into a battle whereby Florence and the papal States joined with Venice to defeat the previously unstoppable army of Milan. The shocking denoument would open the way for the flowering of Florentine culture, and the birth of what we now know as the Renaissance. There was, perhaps, no stunning evidence of this than a massive painting by Leonardo da Vinci commemorating the Battle of Anghiari, a masterpiece that quickly became famous—but then was mysteriously lost. Until recently, that is, when researchers made a breathtaking discovery of the location where it has been hidden for more than four hundred years. In The Day the Renaissance Was Saved, Niccolò Capponi—a direct descendent of Niccolò Machiavelli, as well as of a Florentine general who was a key strategist of the campaign at Anghiari—weaves the story of da Vinci’s lost masterpiece through the narrative of the history-changing battle, and offers context on the development of humanist thought and the political intrigues of fifteenth-century Italy. Complete with maps and twenty-four color images, this is military history, political history, and art history all rolled into one, from a scholar whose ancestors were key players in the scheming, plotting, and fighting that led to this pivotal moment in Western history.
Download or read book The Shadow Drawing written by Francesca Fiorani and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[The Shadow Drawing] reorients our perspective, distills a life and brings it into focus—the very work of revision and refining that its subject loved best." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times | Editors' Choice An entirely new account of Leonardo the artist and Leonardo the scientist, and why they were one and the same man Leonardo da Vinci has long been celebrated for his consummate genius. He was the painter who gave us the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and the inventor who anticipated the advent of airplanes, hot air balloons, and other technological marvels. But what was the connection between Leonardo the painter and Leonardo the scientist? Historians of Renaissance art have long supposed that Leonardo became increasingly interested in science as he grew older and turned his insatiable curiosity in new directions. They have argued that there are, in effect, two Leonardos—an artist and an inventor. In this pathbreaking new interpretation, the art historian Francesca Fiorani offers a different view. Taking a fresh look at Leonardo’s celebrated but challenging notebooks, as well as other sources, Fiorani argues that Leonardo became familiar with advanced thinking about human vision when he was still an apprentice in a Florence studio—and used his understanding of optical science to develop and perfect his painting techniques. For Leonardo, the task of the painter was to capture the interior life of a human subject, to paint the soul. And even at the outset of his career, he believed that mastering the scientific study of light, shadow, and the atmosphere was essential to doing so. Eventually, he set down these ideas in a book—A Treatise on Painting—that he considered his greatest achievement, though it would be disfigured, ignored, and lost in subsequent centuries. Ranging from the teeming streets of Florence to the most delicate brushstrokes on the surface of the Mona Lisa, The Shadow Drawing vividly reconstructs Leonardo’s life while teaching us to look anew at his greatest paintings. The result is both stirring biography and a bold reconsideration of how the Renaissance understood science and art—and of what was lost when that understanding was forgotten.
Download or read book Leonardo Da Vinci written by Luke Syson and published by National Gallery London. This book was released on 2011 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new examination of Leonardo's career that illuminates his time as court painter to the Duke of Milan, an experience that fundamentally changed his outlook and his legacy
Download or read book Leonardo s Lost Princess written by Peter Silverman and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2011-12-19 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How an oddly attributed $19,000 picture proved to be a $100 million work by Leonardo da Vinci—a true art-world detective story In late 2010, art collector Peter Silverman revealed that a "German, early 19th century" portrait he had bought for $19,000 was, in fact, a previously unknown drawing by Leonardo da Vinci—an exquisite depiction of Bianca Sforza, rendered 500 years ago. In Leonardo's Lost Princess, Silverman gives a riveting first-person account of how his initial suspicions of the portrait's provenance were confirmed repeatedly by scientists and art experts. He describes the path to authentication, fraught with opposition and controversy. The twists and turns of this fascinating, decade-long quest lead from art history to cutting-edge science, and from a New York art gallery to Paris, Milan, Zurich, and ultimately a Warsaw library where the final, convincing evidence that the portrait was indeed by da Vinci was found. Takes an up-close look at the workings of the art world and at figures ranging from dealers and connoisseurs to a suspected forger Discusses current scientific techniques used to investigate and authenticate works of art, such as carbon dating and cutting-edge photography Uses Silverman's drawing as an entree into Leonardo da Vinci's world: his studio, his style, and his methods Explores the intersection of art and science in the authentication process, involving the work of a man who embodied that intersection Unearthing the secrets almost lost to history, the book is ideal reading for art lovers and anyone interested in an astounding case of "whodunit."
Download or read book The Da Vinci Notebooks written by Leonardo (da Vinci) and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towering across time as the painter of the Mona Lisa, forever famous as a sculptor and inventor, Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest minds of both the Italian Renaissance and Western civilization. Dan Browns The Da Vinci Code and recent in-depth biographies have stimulated renewed interest in da Vinci and his complex and inquiring intelligence. This brand-new selection of sketches, diagrams, and writings from his notebooks is a beautiful and varied record of da Vincis theories and observations, embracing not only art but also architecture, town planning, engineering, naval warfare, music, medicine, mathematics, science, and philosophy. The notebooksa treasure trove of unparalleled ingenuity, curiosity, and creative energyhave inspired readers for centuries. This new selection is the perfect introduction to the mysteries of da Vinci.
Download or read book Da Vinci s Last Commission written by Fiona McLaren and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine you have an old painting, a Madonna and Child, that has been in your family for years. It is beautiful, serene and spellbinding. It hangs on your wall and for a long time you take it for granted. But curiosity to know more about it gradually grows until it becomes irresistible. You call in the experts. They get excited. What if that old family painting was thought to be by a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci – or even the great master himself? You start researching, communicating with academics and institutions all over the world. The results of your research are nothing short of astounding. What would you do if that painting pointed to one of the greatest heresies of our time? And what if it revealed an incredible story that the Roman Catholic Church has been desperate to keep secret at all costs for centuries? Da Vinci’s Last Commission by Fiona McLaren is one of the most astonishing detective stories in the history of art. It is also an account of the courage and tenacity of a woman who challenged the international art establishment, orthodox history and the Church in her quest for the truth.
Download or read book The lost symbol written by Dan Brown and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Langdon, while at the U.S. Capital Building, finds an object encoded with five symbols, which is an ancient invitation to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of esoteric wisdom. When Langdon's belived mentor, Peter Solomon, is kidnapped, he realizes his only hope of saving Peter is to accept this mystical invitation and follow wherever it leads him. Langdon is instantly plunged into a clandestine world of Masonic secrets, hidden history, and never-before-seen locations - all of which seem to be dragging him toward a single, inconceivable truth.
Download or read book Living with Leonardo Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond written by Martin Kemp and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaching the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, the world- renowned da Vinci expert recounts his fifty- year journey with the work of the world’s most famous artist A personal memoir interwoven with original research, Living with Leonardo takes us deep inside Leonardo da Vinci scholar Martin Kemp’s lifelong passion for the genius who has helped define our culture. Each chapter considers a specific work as Kemp offers insight into his encounters with academics, collectors, curators, devious dealers, auctioneers, and authors— as well as how he has grappled with legions of “Leonardo loonies,” treaded vested interests in academia and museums, and fended off fusillades of non- Leonardos. Kemp explains his thinking on the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, retells his part in the identification of the stolen Buccleuch Madonna, and explains his involvement on the two major Leonardo discoveries of the last 100 years: La Bella Principessa and Salvator Mundi. His engaging narrative elucidates the issues surrounding attribution,the scientific analyses that support experts’ interpretations, and the continuing importance of connoisseurship. Illustrated with the works being discussed, Living with Leonardo explores the artist’s genius from every angle, including technical analysis and the pop culture works he inspired, such as The Da Vinci Code, and his enduring influence 500 years after his death.
Download or read book Leonardo Da Vinci on Painting written by Leonardo (da Vinci) and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
