Thursday, August 25, 2011

A Definitive Guide to Leonardo da Vinci’s Paintings and Drawings

From anatomy to aviation, or what Leonardo’s drawings reveal about cross-disciplinary creativity.

Leonardo da Vinci possessed a rare kind of cross-disciplinary genius. It’s safe to say the Italian painter, engineer, architect, sculptor, scientist and futurist was one of the greatest minds that ever lived, a kind of intellectual and creative powerhouse that influenced centuries of thinkers to come. Now, his life and legacy live on in the simply titled but wildly ambitous Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings — a remarkable two-volume tome from Taschen that surveys da Vinci’s life and work in unprecedented detail, from in-depth interpretations of all 34 of his famous paintings to breathtaking full-bleed details of his masterworks to an extensive catalog of 663 of his drawings. This being a Taschen production, it’s as lavish as they come, at 700 pages, 6.5 pounds and nearly the size of the Mona Lisa, and features appropriately supersized blowups of Leonardo’s paintings balanced with insightful contextualizations by Renaissance theorist Frank Zöllner and art historian Johannes Nathan for the perfect blend of scholarly and stunning.

(Via Brain Pickings.)

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