Leonardo da Vinci: A Life Through Paintings
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Leonardo da Vinci: A Life Through Paintings Details
A richly illustrated account of Leonardo's life and career as a painter, with an in-depth analysis of all his paintings.
Reviews
I'm very grateful Amazon stocked this medium-size authentic Italian monograph. The kind one normally has to travel 6000 miles to find in an Italian art gallery or church. In my case only after buying a little booklet covering the contents of Santa Felicita in Florence did I find "Mandragon" are a small Florentine publishing house. Who naturally concentrate on Italian Art - and as one would expect (being Printed in Italy) make certain their reproductions do full justice to the original artwork. By going to their website I discovered this book had 118 illustrations on 171 pages. At such a reasonable price it was bound to be "a good deal".As Leonardo only painted 15 fully authenticated paintings this book is just right size to provide all the visual information any reasonable art-aficionardo needs to have at their fingertips. To put Leonardo in context at least a quarter of the illustrations are of paintings by others who were influential in his youth - and those who were later seduced by his innovations. Another quarter are devoted to Leonardo's drawings (studies) which in many respects are more beautiful than his paintings. 16 are enlarged details of the authenticated paintings.Its limited size also precludes a superfluity of explanatory text. What there is has been expertly translated by Catherine Bolton who found a way to make Italian art expertize much easier to comprehend than when the usual professorial Italian hyperbole is translated word for word.As Leonardo is the quintissential "Renaissance Man" it is of course temping to buy huge monographs containing hundreds of pages reproducing his scientific drawings (with reverse writing). In my opinion a waste of time and money. His occasional forays into the mysterious process of representing human beauty are a far more illuminating and rewarding means to understand his part in the evolution of the entire Italian Renaissance. Which started 100 years earlier with the Donatello, Brunellesci, Ghiberti and Masaccio generation. To be followed by Verrocchio, in whose workshop Leonardo learnt his trade - and where this excellent book also begins.
