The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci - Richard Poss

Presented by Professor Richard Poss

Leonardo continues to fascinate and provoke, his myriad activities still studied by experts in a wide variety of fields. New discoveries are continually being made about his engineering ideas, his drawings and manuscripts, the provenance of his paintings, and his life and opinions. This seminar will examine Leonardo’s emergence in the context of the ongoing Renaissance in Florence and will follow his life through his movements between Florence, Milan, Venice, and Rome to his eventual residence at Amboise. We will study his anatomical drawings, his great paintings, his philosophical and theoretical speculations, his detailed engineering diagrams, his self-probing psychological analyses, and his futuristic inventions. Above all we will reconsider the current critical estimation of his paintings and their place in our conception of what art is. Class sessions will be a combination of lecture and wide-ranging discussion.