Synopses & Reviews
An all-new, jewel-like, reader-friendly format gives new life to this relaunch of an international best-seller.
Leonardo da Vinci--artist, inventor, and prototypical Renaissance man--is a perennial source of fascination because of his astonishing intellect and boundless curiosity about the natural and man-made world. During his life he created numerous works of art and kept voluminous notebooks that detailed his artistic and intellectual pursuits.
The collection of writings and art in this magnificent book are drawn from his notebooks. The book organizes his wide range of interests into subjects such as human figures, light and shade, perspective and visual perception, anatomy, botany and landscape, geography, the physical sciences and astronomy, architecture, sculpture, and inventions. Nearly every piece of writing throughout the book is keyed to the piece of artwork it describes.
The writing and art is selected by art historian H. Anna Suh, who provides fascinating commentary and insight into the material, making Leonardo's Notebooks an exquisite single-volume compendium celebrating his enduring genius.
Synopsis
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) possessed arguably the greatest mind the world has ever known. Artist, draftsman, inventor, and philosopher, his contributions to modern society are profound and wide-reaching. Throughout his life, Leonardo kept dozens of notebooks, elegant studies on topics ranging from architecture to botany to philosophy--indeed nearly anything of which the human imagination could conceive.
Leonardo's Notebooks collects a variety of the most fascinating of these studies and compiles them into one monumental volume that demystifies his insights and clearly illustrates his ideas, experiments, and observations with hundreds of his original sketches, line drawings, and paintings. Topics include Anatomy and the Movement of the Human Figure; Botany and Landscape; Engineering and Military Engineering; Physical Sciences; Aerodynamics and Flight; Geography--and more.
Synopsis
A compilation of da Vinci's most fascinating studies, this monumental volume demystifies his insights and clearly illustrates his ideas, experiments, and observations with hundreds of his original sketches, line drawings, and paintings.
Synopsis
The award-winning and bestselling collection of the exquisite, annotated notebooks of Leonardo now in paperback. Culled from more than 7,000 pages of sketches and writings found in various rare books, papers, and other resources throughout the world, Leonardo's Notebooks presents, for the first time, an exhaustive collection of the insights and brilliance of perhaps the finest mind the world has ever known.
H. Anna Suh selected the most fascinating of these studies, penned in the mid-15th century, and compiled them into one monumental volume that showcases Leonardo's observations and clearly illustrates them with more than 1,000 of his original sketches and exquisite line drawings. These elegant studies are of myriad topics, such as the nature of water, light and shade, perspective, philosophy, botany, astronomy, the proportions of the human figure, and many other subjects. The artwork has been carefully arranged with the text to augment and illuminate Leonardo's writings. In addition, his handwritten notes and fascinating marginalia are deciphered and translated.
About the Author
Leonardo da Vinci is recognized as the quintessential Renaissance Man. A great painter, he was equally prodigious in the fields of architecture, engineering, anatomy, and physical science.
H. Anna Suh has a master's degree in art and archaeology from Princeton University. She was on the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has worked on projects for scholarly publications at the Met, New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum, and Harvard University. She lives in New York City.