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66
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
44/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Francesca Fiorani
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
November 17, 2020
Leonardo da Vinci has long been celebrated for his consummate genius. He was the painter who gave us the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and the inventor who anticipated the advent of airplanes, hot air balloons, and other technological marvels. But what was the connection between Leonardo the painter and Leonardo the scientist? In this new interpretation, the art historian Francesca Fiorani offers a different view.
What The Reviewers Say
In The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint, Francesca Fiorani, a professor of art history at the University of Virginia, offers a different interpretation of the relation between Leonardo’s various activities.
By no means is Fiorani the first to make this case...but she makes it with fresh force and pitches it against the misconception that Leonardo abandoned painting for science in his later years.
Fiorani (The Marvel of Maps), an art historian at the University of Virginia, provides new insight into the work of Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci in this fresh assessment.
University of Virginia art historian Fiorani’s sparkling second book explores how Leonardo’s love of science informed his art. Intimately capturing the artistic, religious, and cultural landscape of Leonardo’s world, the author traces his development as an artist from his early apprenticeship days to the lessons he learned as he painted his greatest works and up to his posthumous legacy.
