num_pages: 304
description: A true genius whose talents embraced painting engineering anatomy and flight Leonardo da Vinci was--and remains--an extraordinary human being indeed one of the most intriguing figures in world history as the recent success of The Da Vinci Code attests. Now in this new biography MartinKemp explores the essential nature of this forever fascinating artist-engineer both as an individual and as a historical phenomenon.How can we best understand Leonardo? How did his mind work--was he prolific but scattered in his thinking or is there a method in what often seems to be his madness? Was he basically an artist who also pursued science and technology or was science--his understanding of the physicalworld--central to his artistic vision? In Leonardo  Martin Kemp offers a vivid portrait of the Renaissance giant that answers these questions and more. The book takes us on an absorbing journey through the life and work of Leonardo looking first at the historical man portraying an impressive andcultivated figure an artist who in truth completed few paintings rarely satisfied a commission and yet lived in style and ended his career with a massive salary. More important the author examines the ideas underlying Leonardo's investigations of nature illuminating his vision of theartist-engineer as matching nature itself in his creativity. Kemp argues that Leonardo's apparent diversities reveal a desire to find an inner unity in the functioning of everything in the observable world. For Leonardo writes Kemp every act of looking and drawing was an act of analysis and heused these analyses to re-make and re-interpret his surroundings. In a final chapter Kemp also comments on the Da Vinci Code and the continuing public appetite for Leonardo and his doings.Beautifully illustrated with a unique thumbnail museum that offers a tour of all Leonardo's paintings plus 30 additional illustrations and life-size reproductions of pages from his famous notebooks Leonardo is a powerful portrait of one of the towering geniuses of world history.
language: English
title: Leonardo
publisher: Oxford University Press