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.

This is a selection of Leonardo da Vinci's writings on painting. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker have edited material not only from his so-called Treatise on Painting but also from his surviving manuscripts and from other primary sources.

"First published in hardback 2012 by Royal Collection Trust".-Title page verso.

"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"--

Leonardo da Vinci was not only one of the leading artists of the Renaissance, he was also one of the greatest anatomists ever to have lived. He combined, to a unique degree, manual skill in dissection, analytical skill in understanding the structures he uncovered, and artistic skill in recording his results. His extraordinary campaign of dissection, conducted during the winter of 1510-11 and concentrating on the muscles and bones of the human skeleton, was recorded on the pages of a manuscript now in the Print Room of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. These are arguably the finest anatomical drawings ever made and are extensively annotated in Leonardo's distinctive "mirror-writing", with explanations of the drawings, notes on related anatomical matters, memoranda and so on. This publication reproduces the entire manuscript, and for the first time translates all of Leonardo's copious notes on the page so that the unfolding of his thoughts may readily be followed.

The #1 New York Times bestseller from Walter Isaacson brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography that is “a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it…Most important, it is a powerful story of an exhilarating mind and life” (The New Yorker). Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson “deftly reveals an intimate Leonardo” (San Francisco Chronicle) in a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius. In the “luminous” (Daily Beast) Leonardo da Vinci, Isaacson describes how Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance to be imaginative and, like talented rebels in any era, to think different. Here, da Vinci “comes to life in all his remarkable brilliance and oddity in Walter Isaacson’s ambitious new biography…a vigorous, insightful portrait” (The Washington Post).

A TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction I. Thoughts on Life II. Thoughts on Art III. Thoughts on Science IV. Bibliographical Note