Download or read book An Overview of Leonardo s Career and Projects Until C 1500 written by Claire J. Farago and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1999 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Also available as the second book in a five volume set (ISBN#0815329334)
Download or read book Leonardo Da Vinci An overview of Leonardo s career and projects until c 1500 written by Claire J. Farago and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 More Than 2 Leonardo in Anti Theory written by Susan Audrey Grundy and published by Susan Grundy. This book was released on 2023-08-22 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South African art historian Susan Grundy offers a trove of unusual and arcanely brilliant alternative ideas about the mysterious Renaissance polymath painter, found in what she calls Leonardo anti-theory. In a narrative full of twists and turns, arguments and counterarguments, readers will be transfixed from beginning to end. Significantly, the author uses anti-theory to demonstrate the paintings and the Notebooks usually attributed to one “Leonardo da Vinci,” were alternatively produced by a number of artists and scientists. Ultimately, Grundy shows all Leonardo anti-theory is (a little bit or a lot) right; while all mainstream rhetoric is (mostly a lot) wrong. The author introduces the neglected masters, and even a possible mistress, in the workshops of Milan, Florence, and Rome.
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 256 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 Da Vinci s Ghost written by Toby Lester and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Da Vinci's Ghost, critically acclaimed historian Toby Lester tells the story of the world’s most iconic image, the Vitruvian Man, and sheds surprising new light on the artistry and scholarship of Leonardo da Vinci, one of history’s most fascinating figures. Deftly weaving together art, architecture, history, theology, and much else, Da Vinci's Ghost is a first-rate intellectual enchantment.”—Charles Mann, author of 1493 Da Vinci didn’t summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. He was inspired by the idea originally formulated by the Roman architect Vitruvius, who suggested that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, related to the earthly and secular. To place a man inside those shapes was to imply that the human body could indeed be a blueprint for the workings of the universe. Da Vinci elevated Vitruvius’ idea to exhilarating heights when he set out to do something unprecedented, if the human body truly reflected the cosmos, he reasoned, then studying its anatomy more thoroughly than had ever been attempted before—peering deep into body and soul—might grant him an almost godlike perspective on the makeup of the world. Written with the same narrative flair and intellectual sweep as Lester’s award-winning first book, the “almost unbearably thrilling” (Simon Winchester) Fourth Part of the World, and beautifully illustrated with Da Vinci's drawings, Da Vinci’s Ghost follows Da Vinci on his journey to understanding the secrets of the Vitruvian man. It captures a pivotal time in Western history when the Middle Ages were giving way to the Renaissance, when art, science, and philosophy were rapidly converging, and when it seemed possible that a single human being might embody—and even understand—the nature of the universe.
Download or read book Leonardo s Legacy written by Stefan Klein and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Young Leonardo written by Jean-Pierre Isbouts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provocative and original, this fresh look at Leonardo da Vinci’s formative years in Florence and Milan provides a radically different scenario of how he created his signature style that would transform Western art forever. The traditional view of Leonardo da Vinci’s career is that he enjoyed a promising start in Florence and then moved to Milan to become the celebrated court artist of Duke Ludovico Sforza. Young Leonardo presents a very different view. It reveals how the young Leonardo struggled against the prevailing style of his master Verrocchio, was stymied in his efforts to produce his first masterpiece in Florence, and left for Milan on little more than a wing and a prayer. Once there, he was long ignored by Duke Ludovico, and enjoyed only tepid Sforza support after his great equestrian project came to nothing. Meanwhile, all the major Sforza commissions went to artists whose names are now forgotten. Isbouts and Brown depict Leonardo’s seminal years in Milan from an entirely new perspective: that of the Sforza court. They show that much of the Sforza patronage was directed on vast projects, such as the Milan Cathedral, favoring a close circle of local artists to which Leonardo never gained entry. As a result, his exceptional talent remained largely unrecognized right up to the Last Supper. The authors also explore a mysterious link between the Last Supper and the fresco of the Crucifixion on the opposite wall, a work that up to now has fully escaped public attention. Finally, they present a sensational theory: that two long-ignored, life-sized copies of the Last Supper, now in Belgium and the U.K., were actually commissioned by the French King Louis XII and painted under Leonardo’s direct supervision. Young Leonardo is a fascinating window into the artist’s mind as he slowly develops the groundbreaking techniques that will produce the High Renaissance and change the course of European art.
Download or read book The Lady Speaks written by W.N. Varvel and published by BrownBooks.ORM. This book was released on 2014-02-13 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thoroughly original work of art history presents a provocative theory about Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa, and Theological Gender Equality. The famous Mona Lisa smile has mystified viewers and intrigued historians for centuries. Completed in 1515, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterwork has hidden the lady’s secret well. Now, after years of research and analysis, W. N. Varvel has decoded the hidden meanings of Mona Lisa. In The Lady Speaks, Varnel reveals the vital message her smile conveys: a secret too dangerous for the artist to acknowledge during his life but one which he hoped future generations would understand and embrace. The coming of the “New Jerusalem” depends on the world’s recognizing what lies behind the Mona Lisa smile. Detailing how the artist wove a calculated fabric of clues, symbols, and images, Varvel establishes not only da Vinci’s, but also Michelangelo’s, belief in Theological Gender Equality. In a thrilling achievement of art history detective work, Varvel tracks clues, links previously unnoticed connections, recreates scenarios, identifies villains and heroes, and presents a persuasive case for what the lady must be thinking.
Download or read book Key Writers on Art From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century written by Chris Murray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-18 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Key Writers on Art: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century offers a unique and authoritative guide to theories of art from Ancient Greece to the end of the Victorian era, written by an international panel of expert contributors. Arranged chronologically to provide an historical framework, the 43 entries analyze the ideas of key philosophers, historians, art historians, art critics, artists and social scientists, including Plato, Aquinas, Alberti, Michelangelo, de Piles, Burke, Schiller, Winckelmann, Kant, Hegel, Burckhardt, Marx, Tolstoy, Taine, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Ruskin, Pater, Wölfflin and Riegl. Each entry includes: * a critical essay * a short biography * a bibliography listing both primary and secondary texts Unique in its range and accessibly written, this book, together with its companion volume Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century, provides an invaluable guide for students as well as general readers with an interest in art history, aesthetics and visual culture.
Download or read book Re Reading Leonardo written by Claire Farago and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly three centuries Leonardo da Vinci's work was known primarily through the abridged version of his Treatise on Painting, first published in Paris in 1651 and soon translated into all the major European languages. Here for the first time is a study that examines the historical reception of this vastly influential text. This collection charts the varied interpretations of Leonardo's ideas in French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Greek, and Polish speaking environments where the Trattato was an important resource for the academic instruction of artists, one of the key sources drawn upon by art theorists, and widely read by a diverse network of artists, architects, biographers, natural philosophers, translators, astronomers, publishers, engineers, theologians, aristocrats, lawyers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and collectors. The cross-cultural approach employed here demonstrates that Leonardo's Treatise on Painting is an ideal case study through which to chart the institutionalization of art in Europe and beyond for 400 years. The volume includes original essays by scholars studying a wide variety of national and institutional settings. The coherence of the volume is established by the shared subject matter and interpretative aim: to understand how Leonardo's ideas were used. With its focus on the active reception of an important text overlooked in studies of the artist's solitary genius, the collection takes Leonardo studies to a new level of historical inquiry. Leonardo da Vinci's most significant contribution to Western art was his interpretation of painting as a science grounded in geometry and direct observation of nature. One of the most important questions to emerge from this study is, what enabled the same text to produce so many different styles of painting?
Download or read book Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art written by Simona Cohen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between medieval animal symbolism and the iconography of animals in the Renaissance has scarcely been studied. Filling a gap in this significant field of Renaissance culture, in general, and its art, in particular, this book demonstrates the continuity and tenacity of medieval animal interpretations and symbolism, disguised under the veil of genre, religious or mythological narrative and scientific naturalism. An extensive introduction, dealing with relevant medieval and early Renaissance sources, is followed by a series of case studies that illustrate ways in which Renaissance artists revived conventional animal imagery in unprecedented contexts, investing them with new meanings, on a social, political, ethical, religious or psychological level, often by applying exegetical methodology in creating multiple semantic and iconographic levels. Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, vol. 2
Download or read book Leonardo Da Vinci Selected Scholarship Leonardo s projects c 1500 1519 written by Claire J. Farago and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1999 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Also available as the third book in a five volume set (ISBN#0815329334)
Download or read book Bibliographic Guide to Art and Architecture written by New York Public Library. Art and Architecture Division and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Complete written by Leonardo da Vinci and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 1118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A singular fatality has ruled the destiny of nearly all the most famous of Leonardo da Vinci's works. Two of the three most important were never completed, obstacles having arisen during his life-time, which obliged him to leave them unfinished; namely the Sforza Monument and the Wall-painting of the Battle of Anghiari, while the third—the picture of the Last Supper at Milan—has suffered irremediable injury from decay and the repeated restorations to which it was recklessly subjected during the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries. Nevertheless, no other picture of the Renaissance has become so wellknown and popular through copies of every description. Vasari says, and rightly, in his Life of Leonardo, "that he laboured much more by his word than in fact or by deed", and the biographer evidently had in his mind the numerous works in Manuscript which have been preserved to this day. To us, now, it seems almost inexplicable that these valuable and interesting original texts should have remained so long unpublished, and indeed forgotten. It is certain that during the XVIth and XVIIth centuries their exceptional value was highly appreciated. This is proved not merely by the prices which they commanded, but also by the exceptional interest which has been attached to the change of ownership of merely a few pages of Manuscript. That, notwithstanding this eagerness to possess the Manuscripts, their contents remained a mystery, can only be accounted for by the many and great difficulties attending the task of deciphering them. The handwriting is so peculiar that it requires considerable practice to read even a few detached phrases, much more to solve with any certainty the numerous difficulties of alternative readings, and to master the sense as a connected whole. Vasari observes with reference to Leonardos writing: "he wrote backwards, in rude characters, and with the left hand, so that any one who is not practised in reading them, cannot understand them". The aid of a mirror in reading reversed handwriting appears to me available only for a first experimental reading. Speaking from my own experience, the persistent use of it is too fatiguing and inconvenient to be practically advisable, considering the enormous mass of Manuscripts to be deciphered. And as, after all, Leonardo's handwriting runs backwards just as all Oriental character runs backwards—that is to say from right to left—the difficulty of reading direct from the writing is not insuperable. This obvious peculiarity in the writing is not, however, by any means the only obstacle in the way of mastering the text. Leonardo made use of an orthography peculiar to himself; he had a fashion of amalgamating several short words into one long one, or, again, he would quite arbitrarily divide a long word into two separate halves; added to this there is no punctuation whatever to regulate the division and construction of the sentences, nor are there any accents—and the reader may imagine that such difficulties were almost sufficient to make the task seem a desperate one to a beginner. It is therefore not surprising that the good intentions of some of Leonardo s most reverent admirers should have failed.
Download or read book Re reading Leonardo written by Claire J. Farago and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the historical reception of Leonardo's Treatise on Painting in a cross-cultural framework, this collection represents the first attempt to chart the influence of the work, an important resource for the academic instruction of artists through four centuries and widely read by intellectuals and lovers of art for three centuries, when Leonardo's ideas and art were known almost exclusively through his book. The volume, dealing specifically with the reception and influence of the artist's ideas, takes Leonardo studies to a new level of historical inquiry.
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.
