Leonardo FROM THE PUBLISHER
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, Martin Kemp 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 physical world—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 and cultivated 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 the artist-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 he used 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.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
A leading authority on Leonardo da Vinci, Kemp (University Professor of the History of Art, Trinity Coll., Oxford) attempts to set forth a succinct, understandable, unified account of da Vinci's creative and intellectual life while departing from the framework of his first monograph on the artist, which emphasized developments of his thought within a biographical narrative. Here, briefly addressing his ongoing personal and literary dialog with the artist's legacy for over 30 years, Kemp focuses on thematic continuities in the Renaissance master's career. He first discusses da Vinci's career in terms of the nature of the commissions he received, the monies he attracted, and his duties in the courts he served. While he illustrates his excursus with more than 40 plates and figures, as well as 24 full-color, thumbnail "gallery" images of da Vinci's known paintings, Kemp only briefly refers to many of the images he cites. Contextual rather than iconographical, his approach is nevertheless fascinating, enlightening, well written, and easy to read. Covering an eternally popular subject and written by an expert who presented his subject in a new way, this significant, though not seminal, publication is highly recommended for most large public and academic libraries.-Cheryl Ann Lajos, Free Lib. of Philadelphia Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Another stab at decoding the real da Vinci. "The only fully valid source of knowledge, for Leonardo, was looking at real things and phenomena," writes Kemp (History of Art/Trinity Coll., Oxford), who in six chapters examines just what it was Leonardo looked at, learned, and passed on to posterity. Leonardo's notion of looking is encapsulated in the English verb "to see," avers the author; it means both "to look at" and "to understand" or "comprehend." Outlining Leonardo's experimental investigations, such as dissections, observations of nature, and fortifications, Kemp links them to his extraordinary notebooks and paintings. The sheer weight of the artist's ambition caused a number of problems. Far from being a genius who methodically produced one extraordinary scientific discovery or painting after another, Kemp demonstrates that Leonardo failed to finish several commissions and apparently never sold a painting; the observations in his famous notebooks were often brilliant, occasionally disorganized and haphazard. The weight of Leonardo's ambition sometimes caused his graphic technique to collapse as his drawings recorded everything his fertile mind observed on a small piece of paper. Similarly, Kemp's attempt to explicate the polymath Leonardo in a short book from time to time suffers from the weight of its ambition. The chapters on art (the author's specialty) read much more easily than the ones on scientific issues, which make earnest but hard going as technical terms are tossed about as if a casual reader should understand them. But Kemp's experience offers just as many pleasures and benefits; after a career spent researching the artist, he's well suited to provide a personal accountof Leonardo, enriched by anecdotes and contemporary analogies. At the close, he succinctly reviews why Leonardo is worth studying, using the Mona Lisaas a case in point and giving a marvelous description of the experience of seeing the painting out of its frame and bullet-proof case. It makes an exceptional finale. A noble attempt to bring a legend down to earth. Agent: Caroline Dawnay/PFD
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