The Shadow Drawing

November 1, 2020
The science of light and shadow illuminates Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary art. University of Virginia art historian Fiorani's sparkling second book explores how Leonardo's love of science informed his art. Intimately capturing the artistic, religious, and cultural landscape of Leonardo's world, the author traces his development as an artist from his early apprenticeship days to the lessons he learned as he painted his greatest works and up to his posthumous legacy. In his book The Lives, Giorgio Vasari's influential portrait of Leonardo "discredited" Leonardo's "science of art," ruining Leonardo's reputation for years. Throughout, Fiorani's detailed attention to Leonardo's notebooks show how much his interests in art and science were interwoven. He produced a handful of paintings, many unfinished, but some 4,100 notebook pages filled with notations, sketches, and technical and shadow drawings. The author notes that in his late 30s, Leonardo's interest in the world of art shifted to focus on science and philosophy, especially optics and the "subtle pattern of shadows" on objects. His earliest works were studies of drapery, and his innovative Florentine teacher, Andrea del Verrocchio, taught him to "carefully observe each fold and to capture the effect of shifting light." Fiorani effectively describes Leonardo's experiments with paints that allowed him to "achieve an astounding variety of optical effects" in his first solo painting, the Annunciation. With his "stunning" portrait Ginevra, he aspired to capture not just a young woman's beauty, but also her soul and a "new way of painting." Adoration, which he left unfinished, "forced him to rethink what he knew and did not know about the science of optics" while Virgin of the Rocks was a "masterpiece of optics." Last Supper, which began to deteriorate shortly after he finished it, is "perhaps the saddest example of Leonardo pushing experimentation too far." Mona Lisa remained unfinished as well. An absorbing inquiry into a legendary artist and his techniques.

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November 23, 2020
Fiorani (The Marvel of Maps), an art historian at the University of Virginia, provides new insight into the work of Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci in this fresh assessment. She examines Leonardo’s training in the Florence workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio and his study of the science of optics before moving on to a technical analysis of Leonardo’s major works, showing how he applied his scientific learning when creating The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. Using information gleaned from infrared reflectography and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy done on Leonardo’s paintings, Fiorani leads readers through the artist’s tortuous re-working of his art. “The secret of the Mona Lisa’s smile,” she notes, is created by the application of “multiple layers of colors and varnishes with low atomic density.” It also becomes clear that Leonardo “understood that the subtlest change of heart or mind involuntarily triggered an alteration in the appearance of bodies and faces” and thus saw painting as “a technique for revealing the human soul.” This beautifully written work is underpinned by immense scholarship; art lovers and historians will not be able to put it down.