Illuminating Leonardo opens the new series Leonardo Studies with a tribute to Professor Carlo Pedretti, the most important Leonardo scholar of our time, with a wide-ranging overview of current Leonardo scholarship from the most renowned Leonardo scholars and young researchers. Though no single book could provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of Leonardo studies, after reading this collection of short essays cover-to-cover, the reader will come away knowing a great deal about the current state of the field in many areas of research. To begin the series, editors Constance...

The second volume of Leonardo Studies explores a dual theme of nature and architecture, offering a wide-ranging overview of current Leonardo scholarship on these two abundant subjects. While Leonardo worked on his Treatise on Painting, he noted that understanding the physical properties of nature must precede individual projects of painting or designing buildings. The volume begins with the Trattato, and follows with physics, geology, painting that imitates architectural structure and vice-versa, and proceeds to architectural projects, questions of attribution, urban planning, and and the...