"Leonardo" is a new, colorful introductory book out the quintessential Renaissance painter, Leonardo da Vinci. "Leonardo" is the 45th and long awaited title in Phaidon's popular and affordle Colour Library series on masters and movements in arts. Each volume in this series (i.e. "Impressionism," "Rembrandt," "Picasso," etc.) includes a concise introduction, full-page color plates accompanied by extensive notes and comparative illustrations, select bibliography, and detailed image source information.
Brimming with 100 illustrations and an extensive essay by Patricia Emison, a distinguished...

Why did Renaissance art come to matter so much, so widely, and for so long? Patricia Emison's answer depends on a recalibrated view of the long Renaissance from 1300 to 1600 synthesizing the considerable evolution in our understanding of the epoch since the foundational 19th-century studies of Burckhardt and Wolfflin. Demonstrating that the imitation of nature and of antiquity must no longer define its limits, she exposes Renaissance style's self-consciously modern aspect. She sets the art against the literary and political interests of the time, and analyzes works both of very familiar...