LEONARDO da VINCI: THE COMPLETE PAINTINGS by Pietro C Marani: Brand New, Abrams

Description: Gorgeous, stunning, large format hardback book with dust jacket, "The Complete Paintings of Leonardo da Vinci" in exquisite color and detail. Published by Henry Abrams, 2000. Out-of-print. This book is a steal at this price, in this brand new condition. Fine/fine/fine condition. Chocolate brown cloth boards with gilt printing front and spine. Textblock clean, tight, square, unmarked. Heavyweight semi-gloss paper supports the 295 illustrations, including 200 plates in full color. Full paintings and tons of detail. Dust jacket in fine condition, no flaws. Photos as above; but my camera does not begin to capture the subtlety of the colors in this exquitite book. "Since his own lifetime, the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci have always been admired as among the greatest achievements of Renaissance art. They have been studied endlessly, yet they remain enigmatic and little understood. Indeed, we still debate which of the numerous works attributed to him are really by his hand, and which are by emulators or members of his workshop. "Now....an eminent scholar reexamines the complete oeuvre of Leonardo, drawing on recent archival research that has uncovered important new documents relating to the artist's work and career. Many of Leonardo's paintings have been cleaned and restored, including the magnificent 'Last Supper,' recently unveled after more than ten years of painstaking conservation. Fresh photography and advanced printing techniques now permit these precious masterworks to be reproduced with unparalleled clarity and accuracy. "All of Leonardo's paintings are here, together with related drawings and many enlarged details that reveal the painter's extraordinary sense of light and shadow, color and atmosphere - the fugitive, intangible quality we call 'Leonardesque.' Among the revelations of this splendid book is the discovery that this mysterious touch of the artist is a literal things; in some of the large-scale photographs we may see his fingerprints embedded in the surface of the paint, where he used his fingertips to blend his celebrated smoky, sfumato tones." (from the flap) "In this magnificent book, Pietro Marani, the director of the project to restore Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, presents all the artist's known paintings. The history and significance of each are analyzed at length: we read, for example, that "from a very early date, Mona Lisa was considered among Leonardo's most extraordinary accomplishments, one that made every other artist 'tremble and lose heart.'" Context is provided by a wealth of related paintings and sketches. The presentation is extravagant: double foldouts show frescoes in their entirety, and small areas are hugely expanded to give access to a world of sensuous detail. The intimacy of these extreme details--a tiny blue landscape glimpsed through a window, or the warm flesh of a baby's foot resting on its mother's arm--is unexpected, and one of the book's many successes. "Marani combines connoisseurship with the technological tools of art history, such as x-ray exploration of revisions in a painting's underdrawings. He has spent his life studying Leonardo's paintings firsthand, so closely that he can point to where the artist lightly blurred layers of paint with his fingertips to suggest the soft skin around the eyes of his portraits of women. A chapter is devoted to Marani's belief that Leonardo was profoundly influenced by ancient artworks rather than being exclusively the "modern genius" described by Romantic critics. The research is fully footnoted, with appendices including checklists of paintings and lost paintings and a collection of all known primary documents referring directly to Leonardo's life. From its enigmatic cover (the lips of the artist's exquisite portrait of Ginevra de' Benci) to its extensive bibliography, Leonardo da Vinci comes the closest this reviewer has seen to being the ultimate art book. " --John Stevenson

Price: 95 USD

Location: Montara, California

End Time: 2024-08-27T19:43:28.000Z

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