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.
The Shadow Drawing is an academically rigorous look at Leonardo da Vinci's development as a polymath and especially how his understanding of mathematical principles and physics informed and helped develop his visual art (as opposed to most traditional historical interpretations which have daVinci moving from visual art to more engineering, design, and invention in the later years of his life). Released 17th Nov 2020 by Macmillan on their Farrar Strauss & Giroux imprint, it's 384 pages and available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.
Despite being an academic, Dr. Francesca Fiorani writes accessibly and authoritatively on the subject and I found myself often so fascinated and caught up in the story that I forgot the amount of time I'd spent reading. Despite being partially an expository work, it is exhaustively annotated and defended with period and contemporary references. The language is precise, but certainly accessible to the average layman reader.
The book is full of facsimile drawings and artwork reproduced in grayscale and in the electronic format, in high definition. The chapter notes and annotations are thorough and provide rich resources for further learning.
I would recommend this one to students of art and history, science, the Italian renaissance, mathematics in art, and lovers of well written nonfiction. This would also make a superlative selection for library acquisition as well as a good supplemental text for classroom study in allied subjects.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
