Leonardo da Vinci

Fülszöveg

LEONARDO DA VINCI
1609 Gravure Illustrations 12 Fiill Color Plates
Tliis volume is the most complete and au-thoritative work ever produced 011 Leonardo. It was originally published in ítaly by the Istituto Geografico De Agostini just before the war, in conjunction with the famous exhibi-tion of Leonardo's work in Milán in 1938. Recently Emil Vollmer, the Germán publisher, joincd with the Istituto and re-edited the volume, making entirely new illustration plates from which this edition is printed. The qual-ity throughout is greatly improved over the originál edition, particularly in respect to the color reproductions, wliich are of unusual faithfulness and beauty.
The translation into English has been made and edited by a group of experts. It has been thoroughly checked and approved by scholars, and has been brought up-to-date where new discoveries about Leonardo and his work have been made.
Leonardo was the foremost genius of the Italian Renaissance, and perhaps the most... Tovább

Fülszöveg

LEONARDO DA VINCI
1609 Gravure Illustrations 12 Fiill Color Plates
Tliis volume is the most complete and au-thoritative work ever produced 011 Leonardo. It was originally published in ítaly by the Istituto Geografico De Agostini just before the war, in conjunction with the famous exhibi-tion of Leonardo's work in Milán in 1938. Recently Emil Vollmer, the Germán publisher, joincd with the Istituto and re-edited the volume, making entirely new illustration plates from which this edition is printed. The qual-ity throughout is greatly improved over the originál edition, particularly in respect to the color reproductions, wliich are of unusual faithfulness and beauty.
The translation into English has been made and edited by a group of experts. It has been thoroughly checked and approved by scholars, and has been brought up-to-date where new discoveries about Leonardo and his work have been made.
Leonardo was the foremost genius of the Italian Renaissance, and perhaps the most ver-satile genius that ever lived. In the prepa-ration of this book 37 of the leading scholars in Europe examined each phase of Leonardo's many activities, and contributed a section 011 it. Leonardo explored all the fields of humán knowledge, many of which were hitherto un-known, that were available to Renaissance man, and this work is a tribute to the universality of his mind. Although Leonardo was pre-eminently the artist, we fmd him here, amongst other things, as the architect, sculptor, inventor of machines, the diviner of the laws of nature, the biologist, the hydraulic engineer and fore-runner in the domain of ílight.
This work reproduces in full color the major paintings, all of the drawings of consequence and, in addition, shows the various schools that he influenced throughout Europe. It represents an achievement in the art of book-making that only Leonardo could have inspired.
This volume is the outcome of the effort fjrst undertaken in 1938 to bring togcther all the data, materials and reconstructions concern-ing Leonardo da Vinci into one comprehen-sive show. The project, which centered in Milán, was soon to suffer a crippling blow trom the war. The collections were dispersed. The machine models which had traveLled as rar as Japan on exhibition were niarooned there. The present work is thus the only endur-ing result of that early endeavour. It should be added that Italy has now taken up the project anew in these post-war years, and that most of the restored collection, including new models, is housed in the splendid cloisters of the old monastery of San Vittore in Milán, which has been transformed into a permanent State Museum for the History of Science and Technology. The present volume, as it stands, represents a unique convergence of expert knowledge from all countries and all fields.
A11 artist first and last, Leonardo believed that understanding cati be reached only by way of the eye which "knows how to see," of the hand wliich knows how to follow the intellect, for basically it is the work of the hand wliich defines for him the compass of man's thought. This may perhaps help us to place in the right light Leonardo's quest for experimentál science. He dissociated himself vividly from school philosophy, for he was convinced that reality cannot be mirrored, still less dealt with, in merely verbal schemes. Structure, motion, form, rhythm and feeling, those essential mysteries of nature, could reveal their coherence only wlien tackled by the crea-tive understanding using all its keys, from dis-cursive to artistic. "Necessity constrains the mind of the painter to transmute itself into nature's own mind, and to make itself an inter-preter between nature and art."
Thus, art becomes the cliief instrument of man for knowledge, and beyond that for action, too. Knowledge is understood as an act of love, "the unión with the thing that is known." It is alsó conceived as creative, in a deeper sense than would be obvious to the scientist of today. The contemplation of the wing of the bird in flight, of the curves of tendrils or of rippling water, of the structure of the body, of the symmetry of leaves and snowflakes, of the whirl of the eddy and the hurricane, was meant ultimately to show the way to a new power over nature. The outcome of art was seen as engineering, the creative saving force which would redeem man from his limitations, his guilt, his ugly obsessions, and make of him the free universal transformer that Renaissance thinkers had projected in their philosophical imaginings. Leonardo's profound pessimism concerning our condition showed him oniy one way out, and it was far from all classical quietude, for it involved the creative activity extending limitlessly. Leonardo may not have founded "modem science" but his vision of man transcending himself through his works is surely the modern dream.
Giorgio de Santillana Vissza