Download or read book The Lost Battles written by Jonathan Jones and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of Britain’s most respected and acclaimed art historians, art critic of The Guardian—the galvanizing story of a sixteenth-century clash of titans, the two greatest minds of the Renaissance, working side by side in the same room in a fierce competition: the master Leonardo da Vinci, commissioned by the Florentine Republic to paint a narrative fresco depicting a famous military victory on a wall of the newly built Great Council Hall in the Palazzo Vecchio, and his implacable young rival, the thirty-year-old Michelangelo. We see Leonardo, having just completed The Last Supper, and being celebrated by all of Florence for his miraculous portrait of the wife of a textile manufacturer. That painting—the Mona Lisa—being called the most lifelike anyone had ever seen yet, more divine than human, was captivating the entire Florentine Republic. And Michelangelo, completing a commissioned statue of David, the first colossus of the Renaissance, the archetype hero for the Republic epitomizing the triumph of the weak over the strong, helping to reshape the public identity of the city of Florence and conquer its heart. In The Lost Battles, published in England to great acclaim (“Superb”—The Observer; “Beguilingly written”—The Guardian), Jonathan Jones brilliantly sets the scene of the time—the politics; the world of art and artisans; and the shifting, agitated cultural landscape. We see Florence, a city freed from the oppressive reach of the Medicis, lurching from one crisis to another, trying to protect its liberty in an Italy descending into chaos, with the new head of the Republic in search of a metaphor that will make clear the glory that is Florence, and seeing in the commissioned paintings the expression of his vision. Jones reconstructs the paintings that Leonardo and Michelangelo undertook—Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, a nightmare seen in the eyes of the warrior (it became the first modern depiction of the disenchantment of war) and Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina, a call to arms and the first great transfiguration of the erotic into art. Jones writes about the competition; how it unfolded and became the defining moment in the transformation of “craftsman” to “artist”; why the Florentine government began to fall out of love with one artist in favor of the other; and how—and why—in a competition that had no formal prize to clearly resolve the outcome, the battle became one for the hearts and minds of the Florentine Republic, with Michelangelo setting out to prove that his work, not Leonardo’s, embodied the future of art. Finally, we see how the result of the competition went on to shape a generation of narrative paintings, beginning with those of Raphael. A riveting exploration into one of history’s most resonant exchanges of ideas, a rich, fascinating book that gives us a whole new understanding of an age and those at its center.

Download or read book Origins Imitation Conventions written by James S. Ackerman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-03-29 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve studies by eminent art historian James S. Ackerman. This collection contains studies written by art historian James Ackerman over the past decade. Whereas Ackerman's earlier work assumed a development of the arts as they responded to social, economic, political, and cultural change, his recent work reflects the poststructural critique of the presumption of progress that characterized Renaissance and modernist history and criticism. In this book he explores the tension between the authority of the past—which may act not only as a restraint but as a challenge and stimulus—and the potentially liberating gift of invention. He examines the ways in which artists and writers on art have related to ancestors and to established modes of representation, as well as to contemporary experiences. The "origins" studied here include the earliest art history and criticism; the beginnings of architectural drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; Leonardo Da Vinci's sketches for churches, the first in the Renaissance to propose supporting domes on sculpted walls and piers; and the first architectural photographs. "Imitation" refers to artistic achievements that in part depended on the imitation of forms established in practices outside the fine arts, such as ancient Roman rhetoric and print media. "Conventions," like language, facilitate communication between the artist and viewer, but are both more universal (understood across cultures) and more fixed (resisting variation that might diminish their clarity). The three categories are closely linked throughout the book, as most acts of representation partake to some degree of all three.

Download or read book Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop written by Christina Neilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Verrocchio worked in an extraordinarily wide array of media and used unusual practices of making to express ideas.

Download or read book The Fabrication of Leonardo da Vinci s Trattato della pittura 2 vols written by Claire Farago and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-29 with total page 1371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The basis for our understanding of Leonardo’s theory of art was, for over 150 years, his Treatise on Painting, which was issued in 1651 in Italian and French. This present volume offers both the first scholarly edition of the Italian editio princeps as well as the first complete English translation of this seminal work. In addition, It provides a comprehensive study of the Italian first edition, documenting how each editorial campaign that lead to it produced a different understanding of the artist’s theory. What emerges is a rich cultural and textual history that foregrounds the transmission of artisanal knowledge from Leonardo’s workshop in the Duchy of Milan to Carlo Borromeo’s Milan, Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Florence, Urban VIII’s Rome, and Louis XIV’s Paris.

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 Balances written by Erich Robens and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book deals mainly with direct mass determination by means of a conventional balances. It covers the history of the balance from the beginnings in Egypt earlier than 3000 BC to recent developments. All balance types are described with emphasis on scientific balances. Methods of indirect mass determination, which are applied to very light objects like molecules and the basic particles of matter and celestial bodies, are included. As additional guidance, today’s manufacturers are listed and the profile of important companies is reviewed. Several hundred photographs, reproductions and drawings show instruments and their uses. This book includes commercial weighing instruments for merchandise and raw materials in workshops as well as symbolic weighing in the ancient Egyptian’s ceremony of ‘Weighing of the Heart’, the Greek fate balance, the Roman Justitia, Juno Moneta and Middle Ages scenes of the Last Judgement with Jesus or St. Michael and of modern balances. The photographs are selected from the slide-archives of the late Richard Vieweg (1896-1972) (former President of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Braunschweig, Germany), of the late Hans R. Jenemann (1920-1966) (former head of the Analytical Laboratory of Schott & Gen., Mainz, Germany) and of his wife Irene (1933-2008) and of Erich Robens.

Download or read book Laboratories of Art written by Sven Dupré and published by Springer Science & Business. This book was released on 2014-04-25 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interconnections and differentiations between artisanal workshops and alchemical laboratories and between the arts and alchemy from Antiquity to the eighteenth century. In particular, it scrutinizes epistemic exchanges between producers of the arts and alchemists. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the term laboratorium uniquely referred to workplaces in which ‘chemical’ operations were performed: smelting, combustion, distillation, dissolution and precipitation. Artisanal workshops equipped with furnaces and fire in which ‘chemical’ operations were performed were also known as laboratories. Transmutational alchemy (the transmutation of all base metals into more noble ones, especially gold) was only one aspect of alchemy in the early modern period. The practice of alchemy was also about the chemical production of things--medicines, porcelain, dyes and other products as well as precious metals and about the knowledge of how to produce them. This book uses examples such as the Uffizi to discuss how Renaissance courts established spaces where artisanal workshops and laboratories were brought together, thus facilitating the circulation of materials, people and knowledge between the worlds of craft (today’s decorative arts) and alchemy. Artisans became involved in alchemical pursuits beyond a shared material culture and some crafts relied on chemical expertise offered by scholars trained as alchemists. Above all, texts and books, products and symbols of scholarly culture played an increasingly important role in artisanal workshops. In these workplaces a sort of hybrid figure was at work. With one foot in artisanal and the other in scholarly culture this hybrid practitioner is impossible to categorize in the mutually exclusive categories of scholar and craftsman. By the seventeenth century the expertise of some glassmakers, silver and goldsmiths and producers of porcelain was just as based in the worlds of alchemical and bookish learning as it was grounded in hands-on work in the laboratory. This book suggests that this shift in workshop culture facilitated the epistemic exchanges between alchemists and producers of the decorative arts.

Download or read book The Kinematics of Machinery written by Franz Reuleaux and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Notebooks The Original Classic Edition written by Leonardo da Vinci and published by Tebbo. This book was released on 2012-06 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning and bestselling collection of the exquisite, annotated notebooks of Leonardo now in paperback. Culled from more than 7,000 pages of sketches and writings found in various rare books, papers, and other resources throughout the world, Leonardos Notebooks presents, for the first time, an exhaustive collection of the insights and brilliance of perhaps the finest mind the world has ever known.

Download or read book Rethinking Technology written by William W. Braham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-12-05 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential reference for all students of architecture, design and the built environment provides a convenient single source for all the key texts in the recent literature on architecture and technology. The book contains over fifty carefully selected essays, manifestoes, reflections and theories by architects and architectural writers from 1900 to 2004. This mapping out of a century of architectural technology reveals the discipline's long and close attention to the experience and effects of new technologies, and provides a broad picture of the shift from the 'age of tools' to the 'age of systems'. Chronological arrangement and cross-referencing of the articles enable both a thematic and historically contextual understanding of the topic and highlight important thematic connections across time. With the ever increasing pace of technological change, this Reader presents a clear understanding of the context in which it has and does affect architecture.

Download or read book Leonardo Da Vinci and Perpetual Motion written by A. Bernardoni and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Figures in the Fourth Dimension written by Ellen Rixford and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Leonardo Da Vinci and the Secrets of the Codex Atlanticus written by and published by . This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Appreciate the multifaceted genius of Leonardo da Vinci with this beautiful look at his Codex Atlanticus. Nowhere is the genius of Leonardo da Vinci more evident than in the famous Codex Atlanticus, which preserves his dazzling ideas on subjects ranging from war machines and musical instruments to human anatomy and powered flight. Now, here are the finest pages of the Codex, shown in high-quality photographs that allow us to see details previously admired only by scholars. Leonardo da Vinci's work emerges with all its peerless force in this beautiful reproduction.

Download or read book The Creature in the Map written by Charles Nicholl and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-06-23 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IntroductionPart One: The Guiana Voyage1. Mapping El Dorado2. Ralegh's America3. A Gentleman of Spain4. Love and Exile5. Preparations6. The Crew7. Atlantic Crossing8. TrinidadPart Two: The Entrada9. The Gulf of Sadness10. The Delta11. Tivitivas12. The Medicine Man13. The Guiana Bend14. Dark Eyes15. Lords of the Borders16. Downtown OrinocoPart Three: The New Dorado17. Gold Rush18. Jimmy Angel19. Canaima20. Meeting Laime21. Welcome to El DoradoPart Four: The Return22. Downriver23. Home24. Ordinary Prizes25. Balsam of Guiana26. A Golden World27. On Red Cross River28. The Shut PalaceEpilogueAppendixes1. The Sparry Papers2. Ralegh's Chart3. The FleetNotesSourcesIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Download or read book Leonardo Architect written by Carlo Pedretti and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 1985 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monumental Mole Vanvitelliana in the harbor of the Adriatic City of Ancona is the spectacular setting for a most original Leonardo exhibition. For the first time Leonardo's presence at Urbino and Pesaro as an architect and general engineer in the service of Cesare Borgia in 1502 is presented in a historical and cultural context that includes every aspect of Leonardos art, science and technology, and also his philosophical outlook. The rarely seen materials, presented here in a fully illustrated catalogue, are also discussed in detail by seven scholars of international repute coordinated by the editor.

Download or read book Design Science written by Vladimir Hubka and published by Springer. This book was released on 1996 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the aim of this study to present a framework for the design of technical systems. This can be achieved through a general Design Science, a knowledge system in which products are seen as objects to be developed within engineering design processes. The authors have developed this design science from a division of the knowledge system along two axes. One deals with knowledge about technical systems and design processes while the other presents descriptive statements. Relationships among the various sections of the knowledge system are made clear. Well-known insights into engineering design, the process, its management and its products are placed into new contexts. Particular attention is given to various areas of applicability. Widespread use throughout is made of easily assimilated diagrams and models.

Download or read book Leonardo written by Carlo Pedretti and published by Giunti Editore. This book was released on 1999 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Da Vinci's engineering genius.