MAP FORUM PRESENTS: The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint ~ Presented by Francesca Fiorani ~ Tuesday, 23 January 2024 at 5pm EST/11pm CET
In her last book, Fiorani reorients our perspective on Leonardo da Vinci, offering a new account of Leonardo the artist and Leonardo the scientist, and why they were one and the same man. Taking a fresh look at Leonardo’s celebrated but challenging notebooks, Fiorani argues that Leonardo mastered the science of optics when he was still an apprentice in Verrocchio’s workshop. Fiorani revises and refines the origin of Leonardo’s ideas on the art of painting, which the artist set down in a book he considered his greatest achievement—Libro di pittura—bringing into focus the foundational role an eleventh-century highly scientific tract by the Arab philosopher ibn al-Haytham had on Leonardo thought and art.
Francesca Fiorani is Commonwealth Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia, where she also served as Divisional Dean for the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Art Department. A Guggenheim fellow and an expert on Renaissance art, science, and technology, she is the creator of the digital platform Leonardo da Vinci and His Treatise on Painting (2012) and the author of numerous books including The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography, and Politics in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005; Yale UP A&AePortal, 2022), Leonardo da Vinci’s Optics. Theory and Pictorial Practice (Venice: Marsilio, 2013) (with Alessandro Nova), and The Shadow Drawing. How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020; paperback 2022), which was widely reviewed, including in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Link to the lecture series HERE.