Leonardo da Vinci's Anatomical Atlas brings together the complete corpus of the artist's anatomical drawings held at the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the world's richest collection of the great artist's work on paper. Text in English and Italian.
According to Count Galeazzo Arconati, who gave other Leonardo manuscripts to the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, the drawings concerning nature, anatomy, and color, have been "in the hands of the King of England before 1640." The collection has been recorded as being in the possession of Queen Mary II, in 1690, a year after she and her husband, William III, ascended the throne as joint monarchs. The collection comprises all the known anatomical drawings by Leonardo. Three hundred images of the human body by the great artist, made between about 1485 and 1510-15, are showcased in this magnificent volume. Based on the artist's own anatomical dissections, they show his evolving understanding of physiology. The drawings demonstrate, as well, Leonardo's progress from technical mastery of his subject to consummate draftsmanship.
The commentary on this astonishing body of work is by Professor Martin Kemp of Oxford University, a leading international authority of Leonardo da Vinci, who explains the uniqueness of the painter's stroke and the refined figurative transposition. One of the most renowned Italian Anatomists, Professor Mario Rende of the University of Perugia, analyses the significance of these works from a medical-scientific angle, revealing the insights, the research methodology, and the experimental and analytical approach of the Genius of da Vinci. Moving between art and anatomy, between unsurpassed illustrative display and avant-garde Renaissance scientific research, the work thus provides an in-depth and comprehensive look at an indispensable aspect of the Great Master's story.
Text in English and Italian.
Martin Kemp is Emeritus Research Professor in the History of Art at Oxford University and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written and broadcast extensively on imagery in art and science spanning the Renaissance to the present day. He speaks on issues of visualization and lateral thinking to a wide range of audiences and is considered one of the world's foremost experts on Leonardo da Vinci, who has been the subject of many of his articles, essays, and books, including Leonardo (Oxford University Press, 2004). Kemp has also published on imagery in the sciences of anatomy, natural history, and optics, as in The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale University Press, 1990). He was trained in Natural Sciences and Art History at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London. From 1993 to 1998 he was Wolfson Research Professor at the British Academy. For more than 25 years he was based in Scotland, at the University of Glasgow and at the University of St. Andrews. Kemp has curated a series of exhibitions on Leonardo as well as on other themes, including Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery in 2000, Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006, and Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now at the Barbican Art Gallery in 2007.
