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 402 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 Leonardo s Return written by Andrew J. Scoma Jr. M.D. and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonardo makes a deal with God to get out of purgatory.

Download or read book Leonardo and the Last Supper written by Ross King and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Milan, 1496 and forty-four-year-old Leonardo da Vinci has a reputation for taking on commissions and failing to complete them. He is in a state of professional uncertainty and financial difficulty. For eighteen months he has been painting murals in both the Sforza Castle in Milan and the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The latter project will become the Last Supper, a complex mural that took a full three years to complete on a surface fifteen feet high by twenty feet wide. Not only had he never attempted a painting of such size, but he had no experience whatsoever in painting in the physically demanding medium of fresco.For more than five centuries the Last Supper has been an artistic, religious and cultural icon. The art historian Kenneth Clark has called it 'the keystone of European art', and for a century after its creation it was regarded as nothing less than a miraculous image. Even today, according to Clark, we regard the painting as 'more a work of nature than a work of man'. And yet there is a very human story behind this artistic 'miracle', which was created against the backdrop of momentous events both in Milan and in the life of Leonardo himself.In Leonardo and the Last Supper, Ross King tells the complete story of this creation of this mural: the adversities suffered by the artist during its execution; the experimental techniques he employed; the models for Christ and the Apostles that he used; and the numerous personalities involved - everyone from the Leonardo's young assistants to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan who commissioned the work. Ross King's new book is both a record of Leonardo da Vinci's last five years in Milan and a 'biography' of one of the most famous works of art ever painted.

Download or read book Young Leonardo written by Jean-Pierre Isbouts and published by Thomas Dunne Books. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jean-Pierre Isbouts and Christopher Heath 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 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-size copies of The Last Supper, now in Belgium and the UK, were actually commissioned by the French king Louis XII and painted under Leonardo's direct supervision."--Publisher's description.

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 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 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 Leonardo s Holy Child written by Fred R Kline and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fred Klineis a well-known art historian, dealer, connoisseur, and explorer who has made a career of scouring antique stores, estate sales, and auctions looking for unusual—and often misidentified—works of art. Many of the gems he has found are now in major museum collections like the Frick, the Getty, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But this book is about the discovery of one piece in particular. . . About ten years ago, when Kline was routinely combing through a Christie's catalog, a beautiful little drawing caught his eye. Attributed to Carracci, it came with a very low estimate, but Kline's every instinct told him that the attribution was wrong. He placed a bid and the low asking price and bought the drawing outright. And that was the beginning of how Kline discovered Leonardo da Vinci's model drawing for the Infant Jesus and the Infant St. John. It is the first work by da Vinci to have surfaced in over a century. LEONARDO'S HOLY CHILD chronicles not only the story of this amazing discovery, from Kline's research all over the world to how exactly attributions work with regards to the old masters (most of their works are unsigned). Kline also sheds light on the idea of "connoisseurship," an often-overlooked facet of art history that's almost Holmesian in its intricacy and specificity.

Download or read book Leonardo written by Martin Kemp and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating exploration of Leonardo da Vinci's life and work identifies what it was that made him so unique, and explains the phenomenon of the world's most celebrated artistic genius who, 500 years on, still grips and inspires us. Martin Kemp offers us exceptional insights into what it was that made this Renaissance man so special, and the 'real' meaning behind such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. Tracing Leonardo's career in all its variety, we learn of his unfulfilled dreams, relationships with powerful patrons, and the truth about his views on God, humans, and nature. The famous notebooks are the key to understanding the secret of Leonardo's success and genius, as they clearly reveal the workings of his mind and display the true innovative and investigative nature of his creative vision. Over 20,000 pages of drawings and notes detail his incredible discoveries and inventions - from the workings of the human eye to designs for flying machines and giant crossbows. Bringing the story up to the present day, Martin Kemp considers what he means to us today, investigates the 'Leonardo industry', and speculates about what he would be doing if he were alive today. This updated edition of Martin Kemp's best-seller is the first book on Leonardo to include two newly discovered works, the most important such discoveries in over a hundred years.

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 402 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 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 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 Martin Kemp and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-10-18 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This masterly account of Leonardo da Vinci and his vision of the world is now widely recognized as the classic treatment of Leonardo's art, science, and thought, giving an unparalleled insight into the broadening and deepening of Leonardo's intellect and vision throughout his artistic career. Martin Kemp, one of the world's leading authorities on Leonardo, takes us on a journey through the whole span of the great man's career. From his early training in Florence, through masterpieces such as The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, to the work of Leonardo's last years, this book gives a fully integrated picture of his artistic, scientific, and technological achievements. Generously illustrated, and now including a new introductory chapter setting Leonardo's work in its historical context, this fully updated new edition provides an unparalleled insight into the marvellous works of this central figure in western art.

Download or read book Leonardo Da Vinci and the Book of Doom written by Simon Hewitt and published by Unicorn. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth investigation into the art, politics and murderous cynicism of Renaissance Milan is is an academic detective story sketched out with erudition and journalistic panache. Debunking the outrageous claim by the notorious Lancashire forger Shaun Greenhalgh that he produced the mesmerizing portrait of a young girl that zoomed into the art world limelight in 2009, Hewitt proves that Leonardo was on intimate terms with both the sitter - Bianca Sforza, teenage daughter of the Duke of Milan - and her husband, Galeazzo Sanseverino, the Duke's Army Captain, effective Number Two and, as Hewitt convincingly demonstrates, the subject of Leonardo's enigmatic portrait The Musician. Hewitt brings the tragic Bianca to life, suggests why and by whom she was likely murdered,and explains why her Leonardo portrait was included in one of the most lavish books ever produced - whose co-illustrator, Giovan Pietro Birago, was paid even more than Leonardo. Finally, in one of the most significant artistic discoveries of recent times, Hewitt shows how Birago's artistic colleagues had no hesitation in lampooning the venerable Leonardo as a Ginger-Haired Gay. 'A remarkable book and a work of impressive scholarship yeteminently readable, helped along by the author's characteristic light touch,the snapshots of the major players and the quality of the illustrations. As adetective story it takes some beating. Chronicling Simon's discoveries, thefascinating people he met on his journey, and the exotic locations he ended upin, his role in piecing it all together is a story in itself' - JOHNFALDING formerly Arts Reporter, Financial Times 'A magnificent journey through time. An amazing book fromfirst page to last' - FRANÇOISE JOULIE Curator of Drawings, Musée du Louvre,Paris

Download or read book The Leonardos and the Forgotten Arab Polymath Zoroastro written by Susan Audrey Grundy and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-10-16 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book recovers the lives of four men masked behind one legend. Reinterpreting recently rediscovered documents shows a Tuscan artist Leonardo da Vinci was banished from Florence around 1477, when at the same moment another Leonardo arrived from the East, an Ottoman agent from Genoese Caffa in the Black Sea. This Leonardo was a military engineer, who began writing technical notes backward in a flourishing Italian script. In Florence, around 1500, he met the alchemist and polymath Zoroastro, who collaborated in producing the scientific Notebooks. However, by the mid-sixteenth century, all memory of Zoroastro had been erased, and the two Leonardos had been conflated into one identity. Crucially, an archived document, rediscovered around 2021, proved that the Tuscan painter Leonardo da Vinci died in 1499. This information leads to the recovery of the artist who really painted the Mona Lisa, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio.

Download or read book Leonardo written by Antonio Forcellino and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-04-27 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A visionary scientist, a supreme painter, a man of eccentricity and ambition: Leonardo da Vinci had many lives. Born from a fleeting affair between a country girl and a young notary, Leonardo was never legitimized by his father and received no formal education. While this freedom from the routine of rigid and codified learning may have served to stimulate his natural creativity, it also caused many years of suffering and an insatiable need to prove his own worth. It was a striving for glory and an obsessive thirst for knowledge that prompted Leonardo to seek the protection and favour of the most powerful figures of his day, from Lorenzo de’ Medici to Ludovico Sforza, from the French governors of Milan to the pope in Rome, where he could vie for renown with Michelangelo and Raphael. In this revelatory account, Antonio Forcellino draws on his expertise – both as historian and as restorer of some of the world’s greatest works of art – to give us a more detailed view of Leonardo than ever before. Through careful analyses of his paintings and compositional technique, down to the very materials used, Forcellino offers fresh insights into Leonardo’s artistic and intellectual development. He spans the great breadth of Leonardo’s genius, discussing his contributions to mechanics, optics, anatomy, geology and metallurgy, as well as providing acute psychological observations about the political dynamics and social contexts in which Leonardo worked. Forcellino sheds new light on a life all too often overshadowed and obscured by myth, providing us with a fresh perspective on the personality and motivations of one of the greatest geniuses of Western culture.

Download or read book The Heart of Leonardo written by Francis Wells and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains all of Leonardo Da Vinci's drawings on the heart and its physiology, accompanied by re-translations of all of the associated notes. All Leonardo's drawings have been interpreted in the light of modern knowledge by a practicing cardiac clinician and anatomist. The veracity of his work is proven against contemporary dissections of cardiac structure and comparison of his illustrations with contemporary images generated by Magnetic Resonance scanners and high definition ultrasound will astound the reader. Perhaps the most interesting element is the re-dissection of the Ox heart set against Leonardo’s own drawings. His place in the greater scheme of anatomical development will be put into context with his ideas of man’s place in the microcosm/macrocosm continuum.