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| Annual Lecture and AGM, 7th May 2010 at the Courtauld Institute: Professor Martin Kemp and Dr. Pascal Cotte, A New Portrait by Leonardo. How do we know? Conference Series: Art and Science in the Italian Renaissance Conference: Approaches to Art and Science after Berenson, 22nd October 2010, at St. John’s College, Oxford, and the Ashmolean Museum
The Society was founded by the late Kenneth Keele,
who combined a distinguished career in medicine with important research
into the work of Leonardo. Officers have included Sir Ernst Gombrich
and Martin Kemp. It is notable that, while all three scholars could
correctly be described as experts on the work of Leonardo, none
of them was or is a specialist on Leonardo in the sense of carrying
out research only into the work of Leonardo. That, of course, also
tells one something about Leonardo.
The Leonardo da Vinci Society is well established
as providing a forum for those interested in Leonardo or more generally
in the aspects of the culture of his time to which he contributed.
The Society's interests also extend to the Art/Science overlap in
other periods (due account being taken of the historical evolution
of both the terms concerned). See recent reviews and publications
in the newsletter.
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The Leonardo da Vinci Society would welcome new members. To become a member, complete and post the membership form. If you pay income tax in the UK, please also consider completing the Gift Aid portion of the membership form. The membership form is available in pdf format. To view the pdf form, you may need Adobe Reader, available here. For further information about membership, please contact one of the following committee members: President, Dr. J. V.
Field, Department of History of Art, Film and Visual Media,
Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Sq., London WC1H 0PD, UK; tel &
fax +(44) (0)20 7736 9198, email: jv.field Vice President, Professor Francis
Ames-Lewis, Department of History of Art, Film and
Visual Media, Birkbeck College; home address: 52 Prebend Gardens,
London W6 0XU, UK; tel & fax +(44) (0)20 8748 1259, email:
f.ames-lewis Treasurer/Secretary, Dr. Tony Mann, Head of
Department, Mathematical Sciences; School of Computing and Mathematical
Sciences; The University of Greenwich; Maritime Greenwich University
Campus, 30 Park Row, Greenwich, London SE10 9LS, UK; tel. +(44)
(0)20 8331 8709, fax: +(44) (0)20 8331 8665, email:
a.mann Web Manager, Dr.
Matthew Landrus, Wolfson College, Oxford University, Oxford,
OX2 6UD, UK, and at the Rhode Island School of Design; tel (001)
(401) 374 4159; email: matt Dr. Monica Azzolini,
School of History, Classics & Archeology; University of
Edinburgh; William Robertson Building, 50 George Square, Edinburgh
EH8 9JY, UK; tel. +44 (0)131 650 9964, fax: +44 (0)131 651 3070,
email: m.azzolini Dr. Juliana Barone, Department
of the History of Art, Littlegate House, St. Ebbes, Oxford,
OX1 1PT, UK; email: juliana.barone Ms. Noël-Ann Bradshaw, School
of Computing and Mathematical Sciences; The University of Greenwich;
Maritime Greenwich University Campus, 30 Park Row, Greenwich,
London SE10 9LS, UK; tel. +(44) (0)20 8331 8454, fax: +(44)
(0)20 8331 8665, email: n.bradshaw Dr. Jill
Burke, School of Arts, Culture and Environment; University
of Edinburgh; 20 Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1JZ, UK; tel.
+44 (0)131 650 4124, fax: +44 (0)131 650 8019, email: jill.burke Dr. Frank A.J.L.
James, Royal Institution Centre for the History of Science
and Technology, Royal Institution of Great Britain, 21 Albemarle
Street, London W1X.4BS, UK; email: fjames The Leonardo da Vinci Society is a registered charity, no 1012878. ^
Within the history of art Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) represents 'science' and within the history of science he represents art. On the trivial level this means that many art historians take it for granted that his anatomical or optical drawings are correct (that is, in accord with twentieth-century views) while historians of science are sometimes at least equally impressionable, being dazzled by the beauty of the drawings with which they are confronted. In Leonardo's work we are seeing into a culture in which academic specialisations make a map very different from that of our own time, and in which, moreover, there is a considerable degree of social separation between a tradition of university learning, and a tradition of practical skills, despite a notable degree of overlap in subject matter. Nor is the advantage all to the person who is 'learned' in the sense of having university training or being able to read Latin. For instance, in Italy, when it comes to geometry or arithmetic, we may not assume that the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century 'scholar' knew more than the 'craftsman'. Also, the practical tradition fares better than the theoretical one in providing lasting monuments to skill. The dome of Florence cathedral (nearly finished when its designer, Filippo Brunelleschi, died in 1446) now looks much more impressive than fifteenth-century astronomical theories - and not only to non-specialists. Since history of art is a better established discipline than history of science, Leonardo has in fact chiefly been studied from the art side, though (for instance) his innovatory methods of illustration, such as his use of an 'exploded' view, clearly had an influence well beyond the realm of what would now be called fine art.
The Society also publishes a newsletter
containing news, reviews and bibliographies. Suggestions of material,
such as forthcoming conferences, symposia and other events, exhibitions,
publications and so on, that would be of interest to members of
the Society for inclusion in this Newsletter should be sent to:
The Editor, Leonardo da Vinci Society Newsletter, 52 Prebend
Gardens, London W6 0XU, UK; tel & fax +(44) (0)20 8748 1259;
email: f.ames-lewis
 hist-art.bbk.ac.uk.
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THE ANNUAL LECTURE AND The 2010 AGM will be on Friday, 7th May at 5:30 pm, at the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House. At 6 pm, Professor Martin Kemp and Dr. Pascal Cotte will give a talk on A New Portrait by Leonardo. How do we know? For more information, see the Lumiere Technology website here and the Wikipedia entry here. Both the AGM and the lecture are open to the public. ^
The Universal Leonardo web site (www.universal leonardo.org) is a resource on Leonardo da Vinci. Universal Leonardo is a programme of European exhibitions, scientific research and web resources on Leonardo organised by Artakt, Central Saint Martins College of Art ad Design, the University of the Arts London. Universal Leonardo is co-directed by Prof Marina Wallace, Central Saint Martins, and Prof Martin Kemp, University of Oxford. Highlights of the web site include an interactive timeline at the top of each page visualising the thematic links and interconnections in Leonardo's works over time; images revealing scientific analyses results carried out on The Madonna of the Yarnwinder (The Lansdowne Madonna); interactive games; a gallery of more than 100 zoomable images of Leonardo's works and exhibition details. ^
ART AND SCIENCE IN THE ITALIAN
RENAISSANCE It is essentially due to what today's historians would regard as an ill chosen set of categories that Leonardo, that is his historical persona, has become a symbol for the meeting of Art and Science, though his activities are indeed unusually multifarious even by the standards of his own time. However, if the categories of Art and Science are defined in twentieth-century terms, Leonardo's work does indeed span them, and since 1990 the Leonardo da Vinci Society has organised an annual series of one-day conferences, in partnership with the Society for Renaissance Studies, on the general theme 'Art and Science in the Italian Renaissance'. Topics treated have included anatomy, optics, engineering, maps, proportion, botany, Vitruvian studies and music. The liveliness of the discussions has tended to confirm that the Society is providing a useful opportunity for the meeting of minds, and helping historians of science, medicine, engineering, architecture and art to bridge the gaps that, since Leonardo's time, have opened up between the disciplines in which he took an active interest. Notes about previous meetings are in the Society newsletters and archives. ^
CONFERENCE: APPROACHES TO ART AND SCIENCE AFTER BERENSON On Friday 22 October 2010, St. John’s College Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum will host a one-day conference on the relationship between scientific models in nature and the theory and practice of art, entitled ‘Approaches to art and science after Berenson’. It will address results of forty years of progress in approaches to the histories of art and science. The main reason for this conference is to honour Emeritus Professor Martin Kemp, a former Hon. President of the Leonardo da Vinci Society, who retired from the University of Oxford in 2008. At issue is the role of Professor Kemp’s research and collaborations in bringing together historians of art and science (as well as artists and scientists) in an interdisciplinary dialogue that is now considered a crucial discourse in both fields of historical inquiry. Essays presented at the conference will be published in a monograph with a similar title in 2011. Reference to Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) in the title evokes a contrast between foundations of the history of art favoured until as late as the 1970s, and the interdisciplinary foundations of the field today. Like Professor Kemp, the speakers have worked on studies of the sciences of optics, anatomy, natural history, art theory, and technology during key episodes from the Renaissance through the twentieth century. Increasingly this collective body of work has addressed issues of visualisation, modelling and representation common to science and art. Professor Kemp has summed up these approaches as addressing “structural intuitions,” a way of understanding shared starting points in art and science. A pioneer in this approach, Professor Kemp is now joined by numerous colleagues in Europe, the US and Asia who are also devoted to what he calls a “New History of the Visual,” which embraces the wide range of artefacts from science, technology and the fine and applied arts that have been devised to articulate our visual relationship to the physical world. He notes that “a scientific diagram or computer graphic model of a molecule is as relevant to this new history as a painting by Michelangelo”. History of Art degree programmes have been slow to adopt these approaches over the past forty years, though the significance of this multidisciplinary role of the field is now the standard at research universities worldwide. Moreover, there are few significant monographs that address the results of this combined approach to the histories of art and science. Now, at Professor Kemp’s retirement, there is an opportunity to draw needed attention to this development in the fields of the histories of art and science. Speakers will include (in the order the schedule): Professor Frank Zöllner, University
of Leipzig Professor Claire Farago, University
of Colorado Professor Domenico Laurenza, University
of Florence Mr. Francis Wells, Papworth Hospital,
Cambridge Professor Carmen Bambach, Curator,
Department of Drawings and Prints, Metropolitan Museum, New York Professor Pietro C. Marani, Politecnico
di Milano Dr. J.V. Field, Birkbeck, University
of London Professor Philip Steadman, University
College, London Mr. David Hockney, CH, RA For more information, contact Matthew Landrus at matt
Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900, edited and introduced by Claire Farago, Ashgate, 2009. Available at Ashgate and Amazon. Rise of the Image, Essays on the History of the Illustrated Art Book, edited by Rodney Palmer and Thomas Frangenberg, Ashgate, 2003. Available at Ashgate and Amazon. Poetry on Art: Renaissance to Romanticism, edited by Thomas Frangenberg, Shaun Tyas, 2003. Usually available at Abebooks. Reports on previous conferences are available in the newsletters. ^
Andrea del Verrocchio, Life and Work, by Dario Covi, Arte e archeologia - Studi e documenti, vol. 27, 2005. Available at Olschki. The Common Purposes of Life, Science and Society at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, edited by Frank A.J.L. James, Ashgate, 2002. Available at Ashgate and Amazon. The Invention of Infinity, Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance, by J.V. Field, Oxford University Press, 1997. Available at Amazon. Leonardo, by Martin Kemp, Oxford University Press, 2004. Available at Amazon Lezioni dell'occhio, Leonardo da Vinci discepolo dell'esperienza, by Martin Kemp, Vita e Pensiero, 2004. Available at LibroCo. Piero della Francesca. A Mathematician's Art, by J.V. Field, Yale University Press, 2005. Available at Amazon. Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo's Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Francis Ames-Lewis and Paul Joannides, Ashgate, 2003. Available at Ashgate and Amazon. Treasures of Leonardo da Vinci, by Matthew Landrus, Carlton and HarperCollins, 2006, in twelve languages. Available at Amazon. ^
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