Living with Leonardo
Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Living with Leonardo is a set of highly focused memoirs, a personal journey interwoven with historical research that encapsulates the authors relationship with Leonardo da Vinci over more than half a century.
We learn of his encounters with the vast population that surrounds Leonardo: great and lesser academics, collectors and curators, devious dealers and unctuous auctioneers, major scholars and authors and pseudohistorians and fantasists; but also how he has grappled with swelling legions of Leonardo loonies, walked on the eggshells of vested interests in academia and museums, and fended off fusillades of non-Leonardos, sometimes more than one a week. Kemp leads us through his thinking on the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, retells his part in the identification of the stolen Buccleuch Madonna and explains his involvement with and his theories on the two major Leonardo discoveries of the last 100 years, one of which plummeted into controversy (La Bella Principessa), while the other underwent a rapid ascent into widespread acceptance (Salvator Mundi). We learn firsthand of the thorny questions that surround attribution, the scientific analyses that support the experts interpretations, and the continuing importance of connoisseurship.
Throughout, from the most scholarly interpretations to the popularity of Dan Browns Da Vinci Code, we are reminded of Leonardos rare genius and wonder at how an artist from 500 years ago continues to make such compelling posthumous demands on all those who engage with him.
Note: best viewed on a colour device
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at Oxford University, serves up a stimulating collection of observations regarding da Vinci and his major works that is both deeply personal and speaks to the enduring interest in the artist's legacy. The bulk of the book homes in on specific paintings that are the linchpins of da Vinci's career. A pair of chapters on The Last Supper deal with controversial restorations of the crumbling masterpiece and address the difficulties that modern professionals face approaching such tasks with "a period eye." Kemp notes how da Vinci "poured his visual knowledge and human understanding" into the Mona Lisa and discusses how da Vinci strove to surpass the achievements of Renaissance poetry by visualizing ideal beauty. Kemp, who has studied da Vinci's work for over half a century, writes with authority and makes esoteric minutiae accessible to the layman, especially in chapters concerned with modern scientific tools including X-rays, infrared reflectography, and microscopy used to establish the attribution and authenticity of paintings. He also demystifies the process by which exhibitions are mounted and writes with bemused tolerance of the "secretology" fad of finding hidden meanings in art inspired by Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. His book is an instructive appreciation of the Renaissance master suited for readers with a general interest in the artist's works as well as those well-versed in the scholarship on this subject. 80 illus.
