Overview
Eight art appreciation books have about 50 full-color illustrations each-many of them faithful reproductions of the artist's paintings. A brief biography of each artist accompanies an explanation of his accomplishments. His sculpture, painting, and pages from the notebooks are shown in this profile of a great Italian Renaissance artist and inventor.
Synopsis
Eight art appreciation books have about 50 full-color illustrations each-many of them faithful reproductions of the artist's paintings. A brief biography of each artist accompanies an explanation of his accomplishments. His sculpture, painting, and pages from the notebooks are shown in this profile of a great Italian Renaissance artist and inventor.
Children's Literature
Part of a series on famous artists, Leonardo DaVinci is an in depth, chronological discussion of the many achievements of this complex man. Well researched and interestingly presented, it covers nearly all aspects of DaVinci's life from birth to death. Various elements of painting such as perspective and portraiture and DaVinci's use of them are discussed and illustrated through quality photographs and drawings. Young artists and history buffs will enjoy this interesting approach to biography. Additional artistic and historical facts are included at the end of the book.
Editorials
Children's Literature
Da Vinci is certainly one of history's most fascinating characters and this book presents some of his many accomplishments, not only in art but in science and engineering as well. The main narrative is informative and written well, but a bit of a tough read for anyone under twelve years of age. The text is broken up into paragraphs with bold headings scattered about the page. Almost every paragraph has an accompanying illustration. A long caption accompanies each illustration, which tends to distract from the main text and create a fragmented page composition. One can certainly learn a good deal from this book, but it takes determination to jump from text to illustration to caption and back again. Most of the illustrations are good, and some of the large ones are excellent. However, in at least a dozen cases the captions wrongly identify details from contemporary Renaissance paintings by such artists as Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Uccello, Raphael and Michelangelo. To be more precise, they are not details from these paintings but copies by unidentified artists, perhaps the artists of the Studio Stalio listed in the credits as illustrators. And most are not good copies. The glossary and index are, on the other hand, good. This book is part of the "Lives of the Artists" series which was originally produced in Italy. 2004, Gareth Stevens Publishing / World Almanac Library, Ages 12 up.—Wesley Jernigan