Leonardo da Vinci
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Overview
The life and work of the great Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) have proved endlessly fascinating for generations. In Leonardo da Vinci, Sherwin Nuland completes his twenty-year quest to understand an unlettered man who was a painter, architect, engineer, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. What was it that propelled Leonardo’s insatiable curiosity? Nuland finds clues in his subject’s art, relationships, and scientific studies—as well as in a vast quantity of notes that became widely known in the twentieth century. Scholarly and passionate, Nuland’s Leonardo da Vinci takes us deep into the first truly modern, empirical mind, one that was centuries ahead of its time.
Synopsis
The life and work of the great Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) have proved endlessly fascinating for generations. In Leonardo da Vinci, Sherwin Nuland completes his twenty-year quest to understand an unlettered man who was a painter, architect, engineer, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. What was it that propelled Leonardo's insatiable curiosity? Nuland finds clues in his subject's art, relationships, and scientific studies—as well as in a vast quantity of notes that became widely known in the twentieth century. Scholarly and passionate, Nuland's Leonardo da Vinci takes us deep into the first truly modern, empirical mind, one that was centuries ahead of its time.
Author Biography: Sherwin Nuland, M.D., is the author of bestselling nonfiction titles including How We Die, for which he won the National Book Award. He is clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also teaches medical history and bioethics.
Seattle Times
...Nuland's enthusiasm and knowledge make his story interesting and easy to read.
Editorials
Seattle Times
...Nuland's enthusiasm and knowledge make his story interesting and easy to read.Giorgio Vasari, an artist who lived a generation after da Vinci, summed up da Vinci as a man who "began many things that he never completed." His projects were often left half-done as a result of insufficient funds or, more usually, wandering creative interests. It is Nuland who hints at the artist's fear of completion, believing da Vinci's episodic and perfectionist nature justified his scattered behavior. Apropos of a medical essay, Nuland's investigation of da Vinci's life hypothesizes the means to the end, allowing da Vinci's enigmatic behavior to remain shrouded in mystery. He is seen as a genius whose desire—and arguably obsession—to investigate nature sublimated his sexual proclivities. Nuland, a man of science who often asks more questions than he answers, uses Freud as a source to explain da Vinci's sexuality and creative impulses, perhaps inadvertently making his own theories seem clinically antiquated. For instance, borrowing from Freud, Nuland extrapolates theories of narcissism behind the Mona Lisa (homosexuals distort the notion of mother onto themselves). Separating the life story from the latter chapters on da Vinci's writing style and his anatomical compositions, Nuland keeps the biography flat, only finding real drama in lost manuscripts—well after his subject's death.
—Scott Markwell