Author: Leonardo da Vinci
Publisher: Dover Publications
ISBN: 9780486824048
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The art world's most famous smile beckons from the front cover of this handy and inexpensive pocket-sized notebook. Bring Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece wherever you roam as you jot down notes, appointments, birthday reminders, and much more -- and since the 64 pages are blank, it's great for sketching as well.
Author: Jonathan Santlofer
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1728240778
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
ONE OF PEOPLE MAGAZINE'S BEST BOOKS OF SUMMER! "Unstoppable what-happens-next momentum."—Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author "A deliciously tense read."—Ruth Ware, #1 New York Times bestselling author From award-winning crime writer and celebrated artist Jonathan Santlofer comes an enthralling tale about the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, the forgeries that appeared in its wake, and the present-day underbelly of the art world. August, 1911: The Mona Lisa is stolen by Vincent Peruggia. Exactly what happens in the two years before its recovery is a mystery. Many replicas of the Mona Lisa exist, and more than one historian has wondered if the painting now returned to the Louvre is a fake, switched in 1911. Present day: Art professor Luke Perrone digs for the truth behind his most famous ancestor: Peruggia. His search attracts an Interpol detective with something to prove and an unfamiliar but curiously helpful woman. Soon, Luke tumbles deep into the world of art and forgery, a land of obsession and danger. The Last Mona Lisa is a suspenseful and seductive tale, perfect for fans of the Netflix documentaries This Is A Robbery and Made You Look and readers obsessed with the world of art heists and forgeries.
Author: Emma Dickens
Publisher: Skyhorse
ISBN: 1628721197
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
Towering across time as the creator of the Mona Lisa, forever famous as a sculptor and inventor, Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest minds of both the Italian Renaissance and Western civilization. His keen scientific imagination and, most of all, his aesthetic and creative genius have forever changed the course of our culture. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and recent in-depth biographies have stimulated renewed interest in da Vinci and his complex and inquiring intelligence. He is a challenging figure easily defined only by his great works, but this revealing selection of sketches, diagrams, and writings from his notebooks is a beautiful and varied record of da Vinci’s theories and observations. They embrace not only art but also architecture, town planning, engineering, naval warfare, music, medicine, mathematics, science, and philosophy. The notebooks—a treasure trove of unparalleled ingenuity, curiosity, and creative energy—have inspired readers for centuries. The Da Vinci Notebooks is the perfect introduction to the mysteries of a master artist.
Author: Leonardo da Vinci
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465514147
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1118
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Book Description
A singular fatality has ruled the destiny of nearly all the most famous of Leonardo da Vinci's works. Two of the three most important were never completed, obstacles having arisen during his life-time, which obliged him to leave them unfinished; namely the Sforza Monument and the Wall-painting of the Battle of Anghiari, while the third—the picture of the Last Supper at Milan—has suffered irremediable injury from decay and the repeated restorations to which it was recklessly subjected during the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries. Nevertheless, no other picture of the Renaissance has become so wellknown and popular through copies of every description. Vasari says, and rightly, in his Life of Leonardo, "that he laboured much more by his word than in fact or by deed", and the biographer evidently had in his mind the numerous works in Manuscript which have been preserved to this day. To us, now, it seems almost inexplicable that these valuable and interesting original texts should have remained so long unpublished, and indeed forgotten. It is certain that during the XVIth and XVIIth centuries their exceptional value was highly appreciated. This is proved not merely by the prices which they commanded, but also by the exceptional interest which has been attached to the change of ownership of merely a few pages of Manuscript. That, notwithstanding this eagerness to possess the Manuscripts, their contents remained a mystery, can only be accounted for by the many and great difficulties attending the task of deciphering them. The handwriting is so peculiar that it requires considerable practice to read even a few detached phrases, much more to solve with any certainty the numerous difficulties of alternative readings, and to master the sense as a connected whole. Vasari observes with reference to Leonardos writing: "he wrote backwards, in rude characters, and with the left hand, so that any one who is not practised in reading them, cannot understand them". The aid of a mirror in reading reversed handwriting appears to me available only for a first experimental reading. Speaking from my own experience, the persistent use of it is too fatiguing and inconvenient to be practically advisable, considering the enormous mass of Manuscripts to be deciphered. And as, after all, Leonardo's handwriting runs backwards just as all Oriental character runs backwards—that is to say from right to left—the difficulty of reading direct from the writing is not insuperable. This obvious peculiarity in the writing is not, however, by any means the only obstacle in the way of mastering the text. Leonardo made use of an orthography peculiar to himself; he had a fashion of amalgamating several short words into one long one, or, again, he would quite arbitrarily divide a long word into two separate halves; added to this there is no punctuation whatever to regulate the division and construction of the sentences, nor are there any accents—and the reader may imagine that such difficulties were almost sufficient to make the task seem a desperate one to a beginner. It is therefore not surprising that the good intentions of some of Leonardo s most reverent admirers should have failed.
Author: Leonardo da Vinci
Publisher: Tebbo
ISBN: 9781486143924
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
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, Leonardos Notebooks presents, for the first time, an exhaustive collection of the insights and brilliance of perhaps the finest mind the world has ever known.
Author: Jonathan Santlofer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143132490
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Written with unexpected humor and great warmth, The Widower's Notebook is a portrait of a marriage, an account of the complexities of finding oneself single again after losing your spouse, and a story of the enduring power of familial love. "This is deeply moving ... beautifully written and modulated, with a dollop of droll, black humor. It is such an achievement, like running uphill against a strong wind."--Joyce Carol Oates On a summer day in New York Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, gasping for breath on their living room couch. After a frenzied 911 call, an ambulance race across Manhattan, and hours pacing in a hospital waiting room, a doctor finally delivers the fateful news. Consumed by grief, Jonathan desperately tries to pursue life as he always had--writing, social engagements, and working on his art--but finds it nearly impossible to admit his deep feelings of loss to anyone, not even his to beloved daughter, Doria, or to himself. As Jonathan grieves and heals, he tries to unravel what happened to Joy, a journey that will take him nearly two years.
Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501139177
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 624
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Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestseller from Walter Isaacson brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography that is “a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it…Most important, it is a powerful story of an exhilarating mind and life” (The New Yorker). Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson “deftly reveals an intimate Leonardo” (San Francisco Chronicle) in a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius. In the “luminous” (Daily Beast) Leonardo da Vinci, Isaacson describes how Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance to be imaginative and, like talented rebels in any era, to think different. Here, da Vinci “comes to life in all his remarkable brilliance and oddity in Walter Isaacson’s ambitious new biography…a vigorous, insightful portrait” (The Washington Post).
Author: Francesca Fiorani
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374715297
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
"[The Shadow Drawing] reorients our perspective, distills a life and brings it into focus—the very work of revision and refining that its subject loved best." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times | Editors' Choice An entirely new account of Leonardo the artist and Leonardo the scientist, and why they were one and the same man 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? Historians of Renaissance art have long supposed that Leonardo became increasingly interested in science as he grew older and turned his insatiable curiosity in new directions. They have argued that there are, in effect, two Leonardos—an artist and an inventor. In this pathbreaking new interpretation, the art historian Francesca Fiorani offers a different view. Taking a fresh look at Leonardo’s celebrated but challenging notebooks, as well as other sources, Fiorani argues that Leonardo became familiar with advanced thinking about human vision when he was still an apprentice in a Florence studio—and used his understanding of optical science to develop and perfect his painting techniques. For Leonardo, the task of the painter was to capture the interior life of a human subject, to paint the soul. And even at the outset of his career, he believed that mastering the scientific study of light, shadow, and the atmosphere was essential to doing so. Eventually, he set down these ideas in a book—A Treatise on Painting—that he considered his greatest achievement, though it would be disfigured, ignored, and lost in subsequent centuries. Ranging from the teeming streets of Florence to the most delicate brushstrokes on the surface of the Mona Lisa, The Shadow Drawing vividly reconstructs Leonardo’s life while teaching us to look anew at his greatest paintings. The result is both stirring biography and a bold reconsideration of how the Renaissance understood science and art—and of what was lost when that understanding was forgotten.
Author: Noah Charney
Publisher: Arca
ISBN: 9780615519029
Category : Art thefts
Languages : en
Pages : 142
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Book Description
Leonardo da Vinci's portrait, called the Mona Lisa, is without doubt the world's most famous painting. It achieved its fame not only because it is a remarkable example of Renaissance portraiture, created by an acclaimed artistic and scientific genius, but because of its criminal history. The Mona Lisa (also called La Gioconda or La Joconde) was stolen on 21 August 1911 by an Italian, Vincenzo Peruggia. Peruggia was under the mistaken impression that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from Italy during the Napoleonic era, and he wished to take back for Italy one of his country's greatest treasures. His successful theft of the painting from the Louvre, the farcical manhunt that followed, and Peruggia's subsequent trial in Florence were highly publicized, sparking the attention of the international media, and catapulting an already admired painting into stratospheric heights of fame. This book tells the art and criminal history of the Mona Lisa. This extended essay in book form, prepared to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 1911 theft, examines the criminal biography of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, with a focus on separating fact from fiction in the story of what is not only the most famous art heist in history, but which is the single most famous theft of all time. In the process this book also tells of Leonardo's creation of the Mona Lisa, discusses why it is so famous, and investigates two other events in its history of theft and renown. First, it examines the so-called "affaire des statuettes," in which Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire were arrested under suspicion of involvement in the theft of the Mona Lisa. Second, there has long been a question as to whether the Nazis stole the Mona Lisa during the Second World War-a question that this book seeks to resolve. This book provides a strong introduction to the Mona Lisa and the thefts surrounding it. "Noah Charney is the Sherlock Holmes of art theft. Beyond his great sleuthing prowess, he writes with the simple grace of a novelist and the erudition of a scholar. Here his subject could be no more dramatic: the impossible-but-true story of the most famous of all paintings, the Mona Lisa. It is a tale that bounces along, implicating the likes of Apollinaire, Picasso, the Nazis, and Nat King Cole. It is easy to pick up and very hard to put down." -Mark Lamster, author of Master of Shadows: the Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens "Deftly written and riveting to read." -Sidney Kirkpatrick, author of Hitler's Holy Relics "Few writers have brought the issue of art theft to the fore with the fervor of Noah Charney. With The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World's Most Famous Painting, Charney has created a work that is equal parts lucid art history and thrilling true crime. Both the popular myths and the hidden truths surrounding the theft and recovery of Leonardo's seminal work provide art theft investigators and museum security directors with important lessons for solving-and preventing-art crime today." -Anthony Amore, art theft and security expert and author of Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists All profits from the sale of the print edition of this book support the charitable activities of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, an international non-profit research group on art crime and cultural heritage protection.
Author: Gene Barretta
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805087036
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 44
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Book Description
Looks at Leonardo da Vinci love of nature and how it inspired many of his ideas.
