Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings - Softcover

Pietro C. Marani

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810991594 ISBN 13: 9780810991590

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 2003

Synopsis

A concise, compact, portable edition of the comprehensive Da Vinci retrospective published in 2000 offers a rich portrait of the artist, covering his life, creative process, and of course, his art--presented in more than 295 illustrations that span the length and breadth of his career. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

In this magnificent book, Pietro Marani, the director of the project to restore Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, presents all the artist's known paintings. The history and significance of each are analyzed at length: we read, for example, that "from a very early date, Mona Lisa was considered among Leonardo's most extraordinary accomplishments, one that made every other artist 'tremble and lose heart.'" Context is provided by a wealth of related paintings and sketches. The presentation is extravagant: double foldouts show frescoes in their entirety, and small areas are hugely expanded to give access to a world of sensuous detail. The intimacy of these extreme details--a tiny blue landscape glimpsed through a window, or the warm flesh of a baby's foot resting on its mother's arm--is unexpected, and one of the book's many successes.

Marani combines connoisseurship with the technological tools of art history, such as x-ray exploration of revisions in a painting's underdrawings. He has spent his life studying Leonardo's paintings firsthand, so closely that he can point to where the artist lightly blurred layers of paint with his fingertips to suggest the soft skin around the eyes of his portraits of women. A chapter is devoted to Marani's belief that Leonardo was profoundly influenced by ancient artworks rather than being exclusively the "modern genius" described by Romantic critics. The research is fully footnoted, with appendices including checklists of paintings and lost paintings and a collection of all known primary documents referring directly to Leonardo's life. From its enigmatic cover (the lips of the artist's exquisite portrait of Ginevra de' Benci) to its extensive bibliography, Leonardo da Vinci comes the closest this reviewer has seen to being the ultimate art book. --John Stevenson

About the Author:

Pietro C. Marani is one of the world's foremost scholars on Leonardo da Vinci and author of more than 30 volumes and numerous essays and articles on the artist and his period. He is former vice-director of the Brera Museum in Milan, and a codirector of the recent restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper. He is now professor of modern art at the Politecnico di Milano.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0810991594
• ISBN 13: 9780810991590
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Edoardo Villata