Synopses & Reviews
This study is the first to consider the whole body of Leonardo's works with an eye to a comprehensive interpretation that combines both cultural history and the history of details. According to Maiorino, Leonardo's was a myth making mode of activity that had a Daedalian range and affected art and technology alike. As both artist and inventor, Leonardo did not separate reason from experience, empiricism from abstraction, an attitude Maiorino characterizes as "Anti-Humanism." Rather than accepting the earlier view that the culture of the Renaissance was divided, he argues that Anti-Humanism was present from the start in such founders as Petrarch and Alberti and continued to be a current in later authors and artists; hence the significance of Leonardo to Humanism and to Baroque and Renaissance culture at large.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [275]-299) and index.
About the Author
Giancarlo Maiorino is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Renaissance Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Adam "New Born and Perfect": The Renaissance Promise of Eternity (1987), The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts (Penn State, 1990), and The Portrait of Eccentricity: Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque (Penn State, 1991).