On a peaceful hillside in Italy in the middle of the 1400s, a young boy strolled with his uncle among the tangled grapevines and silvery-green olive trees.
— from Leonardo da Vinci
Most acclaimed
Leonardo da Vinci
The author of the acclaimed bestsellers Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography. Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves 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. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. 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. His creativity, like that of other great innovators, came from having wide-ranging passions. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips, and then painted history’s most memorable smile. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. Isaacson also describes how Leonardo’s lifelong enthusiasm for staging theatrical productions informed his paintings and inventions. 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 of instilling, both in ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.
Goya
Goya ranks as one of the finest exponents of intaglio engraving in the history of art. His consummate mastery of the techniques of etching and aquatint, and of lithography - the latter a recent invention when he turned to it - was placed at the service of imagery that provides an intimate record of the artist's response to the times in which he lived, as full of conflict and upheaval as our own. Alongside single prints of sacred and profane subjects, it is above all on four major series of etchings that Goya's reputation as a print-maker rests. The biting social criticism of Los caprichos, the savage indictment of war and violence in Los desastres de la guerra, the intense drama of the bullfight in La tauromaquia and the elusive symbolism of Los disparates speak to us with undiminished power across two centuries. For the most part, Goya's prints, which provided unequivocal evidence of his Enlightenment sympathies, were denied the wide circulation he intended for them. The artist's privileged position as Court Painter did not place him outside the orbit of the repressive regime in Spain before, during and after the Peninsular war with Napoleonic France; indeed, the Desastres series was not published until almost forty years after his death. This volume, previously published in Spanish by the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid, reproduces all known etchings and lithographs by Goya, including some rare impressions rejected by the artist. Following a general appraisal, the authors provide introductory texts to each chapter and commentaries on all the prints. A note on print-making techniques used by Goya, an extensive bibliography and a detailed chronology of Goya's life and works and of contemporary political and cultural events complete a book that will delight both the general art lover and the connoisseur.