Leonardo da Vinci
Category: Books,Biographies & Memoirs,Arts & Literature
Leonardo da Vinci Details
-- Leonardo Da Vinci was the original Renaissance man, "a man for all seasons, " with some of the most profound discoveries and accomplishments ever documented.-- This is the first English translation of the acclaimed Russian volume published in 1962.-- Zubov presents an interpretative biography in which he seeks to describe the characteristics of Da Vinci's scientific and philosophical ideas.
Reviews
Leonardo is so famous that everyone wants to write about him, and this leads to a huge pile of meritless writing. To write a good biography of Leonardo, one has to have a command of the physics, music, painting, optics, architecture (in particular statics), sculpting, anatomy, geology, hydraulics, and crafts that Leonardo would have been familiar with. More than just the books that Leonardo read, one also has to know what was taught at the northern Italian universities, and what was folk knowledge. One would furthermore have to know about the society in which Leonardo lived to understand how Leonardo earned his living; if Leonardo had been born to a fortune, would he have spent his time differently? To write well on a particular area of Leonardo's work one doesn't need to know all of this, but as an example, I think that to write about Leonardo's painting one ought to know about Archimedes' work on the lever and Leonardo's thoughts on weights.It also becomes clear after reading many excerpts from Leonardo's notebooks, and Zubov states this explicitly, that a quote from him without context is nearly meaningless. Leonardo made strange contradictory statements in his notebooks, and you can choose many quotes that make Leonardo seem a visionary if you didn't bother reading other passages where he says the opposite thing. Moreover, he may use words differently from what are now their precise meanings. In particular, unless you have made a serious study of Leonardo's work, or at least have read the section of his notebooks from which a quote is taken, I recommend against ornamenting your writings with quotes from Leonardo.Aside from its first chapter, which is a short biography of Leonardo, this book is mostly explanation of passages in Leonardo's notebooks, and it is probably too dense to be pleasant to read for anyone except an expert on Leonardo, which I am not. But although it isn't fun to read, this book is valuable because it clarifies what Leonardo means. If you want to make a serious study of Leonardo, I strongly recommend using Zubov's book.
