This book is the first study to provide a comprehensive historical and theoretical account of the Academia Leonardi Vinci. Pederson brings together literary sources to offer a new interpretation of the academy not as one singular entity, but as a collection of academic modalities in Renaissance Milan. Eventually these various modalities converged around their namesake Leonardo da Vinci, as well as the architect Donato Bramante. This group drew together not only humanists, as in other early Italian academies, but also practitioners of a range of disciplines that ultimately gave way to a new kind of group. This collective of creative personages generated forms of expression that explored the liminal spaces between art, geometry, architecture, and the natural world, which in turn stimulated conversation and debate. This activity made it different from other early Italian academies, and in this way it offered something entirely new.

How our image of the Renaissance’s most famous artist is a modern myth Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers, many of whom have filled in the gaps of what can be known of Leonardo’s life with claims to decode secrets, reveal mysteries of a vanished past, or discover lost masterpieces of spectacular value. In this original and provocative book, Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo’s words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. By investigating the politics and cultural tensions of the era as well as the most recent scholarship on Leonardo’s contemporaries, workshop, and writings, Campbell places Leonardo back into the milieu that shaped him and was shaped by him. He shows that it is in the gaps and contradictions of what we know of Leonardo’s life that a less familiar and far more historically significant figure appears.

The second volume of Leonardo Studies explores a dual theme of nature and architecture, offering a wide-ranging overview of current Leonardo scholarship on these two abundant subjects. While Leonardo worked on his Treatise on Painting, he noted that understanding the physical properties of nature must precede individual projects of painting or designing buildings. The volume begins with the Trattato, and follows with physics, geology, painting that imitates architectural structure and vice-versa, and proceeds to architectural projects, questions of attribution, urban planning, and and the dissemination of Leonardo’s writings in the Trattato and its historiography. This impressive group of articles constitutes not only new research, but also a departure point for future studies on these topics. Contributors are: Janis Bell, Andrea Bernardoni, Marco Carpiceci, Paolo Cavagnero, Fabio Colonnese, Kay Etheridge, Diane Ghirardo, Claudio Giorgione, Domenico Laurenza, Catherine Lucheck, Silvio Mara, Jill Pederson, Richard Schofield, Sara Taglialagamba, Cristiano Tessari, Marco Versiero, and Raffaella Zama.

Italian court culture of the fifteenth century was a golden age, gleaming with dazzling princes, splendid surfaces, and luminous images that separated the lords from the (literally) lackluster masses. In Brilliant Bodies, Timothy McCall describes and interprets the Renaissance glitterati—gorgeously dressed and adorned men—to reveal how charismatic bodies, in the palazzo and the piazza, seduced audiences and materialized power. Fifteenth-century Italian courts put men on display. Here, men were peacocks, attracting attention with scintillating brocades, shining armor, sparkling jewels, and glistening swords, spurs, and sequins. McCall’s investigation of these spectacular masculinities challenges widely held assumptions about appropriate male display and adornment. Interpreting surviving objects, visual representations in a wide range of media, and a diverse array of primary textual sources, McCall argues that Renaissance masculine dress was a political phenomenon that fashioned power and patriarchal authority. Brilliant Bodies describes and recontextualizes the technical construction and cultural meanings of attire, casts a critical eye toward the complex and entangled relations between bodies and clothing, and explores the negotiations among makers, wearers, and materials. This groundbreaking study of masculinity makes an important intervention in the history of male ornamentation and fashion by examining a period when the public display of splendid men not only supported but also constituted authority. It will appeal to specialists in art history and fashion history as well as scholars working at the intersections of gender and politics in quattrocento Italy.

"An exploration of depictions and use of water within Renaissance Italy, and especially in the work of polymath Leonardo da Vinci. Both a practical necessity and a powerful symbol, water presents one of the most challenging problems in visual art due to its formlessness, clarity, and mutability. In Renaissance Italy, it was a nearly inexhaustible subject of inquiry for artists, engineers, and architects alike: it represented an element to be productively harnessed and a force of untamed nature. Watermarks places the depiction and use of water within an intellectual history of early modern Italy, examining the parallel technological and aesthetic challenges of mastering water and the scientific and artistic practices that emerged in response to them. Focusing primarily on the wide-ranging work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)-at once an artist, scientist, and inventor-Leslie Geddes shows how the deployment of artistic media, such as ink and watercolor, closely correlated with the engineering challenges of controlling water in the natural world. For da Vinci and his peers, she argues, drawing was an essential form of visual thinking. Geddes analyses a wide range of da Vinci's subject matter, including machine drawings, water management schemes, and depictions of the natural landscape, and demonstrates how drawing-as an intellectual practice, a form of scientific investigation, and a visual representation-constituted a distinct mode of problem solving integral to his understanding of the natural environment. Throughout, Geddes draws important connections between works by da Vinci that have long been overlooked, the artistic and engineering practices of his day, and critical questions about the nature of seeing and depicting the almost unseeable during the early modern period"--

This remarkable manuscript is almost 500 years old and was hand-written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci in his characteristic "mirror writing" and supported by copious sketches. It covers a wide range of his observations and theories on astronomy, the properties of water, rocks, fossils, air, and celestial light. The Codex Leicester provides a rare insight into the inquiring mind of the definitive Renaissance artist, scientist, and thinker as well as an exceptional illustration of the link between art and science and the creativity of the scientific process. Each delicate page is faithfully reproduced and accompanied by an insightful interpretation of the original Italian texts by the foremost Leonardo scholar, Professor Carlo Pedretti. There is also an introductory essay by Michael Desmond.

If the fifteenth century in Italy has been seen as the moment when the constellation of disciplines known as "the humanities" begins to take shape, it was also a time when a "crisis in the humanities" - their value, their limits, who and what they included or excluded - was also manifest. A largely nineteenth century construction of "Renaissance humanism" has indelibly cast humanist pursuits in terms of writing, with arts of making or techne sometimes idealized as a second order manifestation of humanist ideas. This book re-examines the career of one socially and intellectually ambitious artist, Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and his intellectual network, to re-open questions of the locations of humanism, the notion of "humanist art," or painting as a form of discourse that far from being ancillary to poetry, history, or rhetoric, served as a model for all three. It will be shown that the place of normativity or typicality that Andrea Mantegna occupies in the History of Art - "Early Renaissance artist," "artist as antiquarian," "Albertian perspectivist," has kept from view the more radical potential of his work for a re-description of early Renaissance painting. The major works examined here - the Ovetari Chapel, the Camera Picta, the altarpieces for Padua and Verona, the Triumphs of Caesar, adopt strikingly original means to address their beholder, and to control and even produce their spatial and ideological milieu, challenging conventional notions of "the gaze" and how it operates in early Renaissance art. Furthermore, Mantegna's representations entail a striking integration of writing and painting as modes of transmission: Mantegna and his audience were highly attentive to the materiality of text, image, and object in the transmission of knowledge. Several of Mantegna works in which architecture or sculpture are depicted (such as The Introduction of the Cult of Cybele to Rome) seem preoccupied by the stability of meaning in the artistic object in circumstances of displacement or commodification. The Triumphs - a monumental series of canvases programmatically devoted to the "bringing back" of the riches of a lost world - offer a programmatic pictorial characterization of what we now call "Renaissance art," engaging its stylistic desiderata, its technical accomplishments - and, in ways that exceed any theory committed to writing - its ideological implicatedness.