#000161
Leonardo Da Vinci
Daniel Arasse
Daniel Arasse's *Leonardo da Vinci* - subtitled *The Rhythm of the World* - is a major study of the artist by one of France's most admired historians of Renaissance art. First published in French to the Prix Andre Malraux and issued in English by Konecky & Konecky in 1998, it is a large, lavishly illustrated volume that reproduces Leonardo's paintings alongside pages from his notebooks on everything from fortification to anatomy. Arasse's argument is that Leonardo's art and his restless inquiry into nature were one project: a single Promethean curiosity working through the eye. The writing is scholarly but alive to the strangeness of its subject, never reducing Leonardo to a checklist of masterpieces. For readers who want Leonardo the thinker as much as Leonardo the painter, it is a generous and intelligent guide.
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The author
Daniel Arasse (1944-2003) was a French art historian and one of the sharpest interpreters of the Italian Renaissance, directing studies at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales and heading the French Institute in Florence. He wrote widely on Mannerism, Vermeer, and the close reading of images.
The book
This study reads Leonardo's painting and his scientific notebooks as a single enterprise, arguing that his curiosity about anatomy, water, machines, and light fed directly into the pictures. Fully illustrated, it won the Prix Andre Malraux in France; the Konecky & Konecky edition of 1998 brought it to English readers.
How it reads
Arasse balances erudition with a genuine feel for Leonardo's oddness, and the book has aged into a respected one-volume account - weightier than a coffee-table monograph, more humane than a catalogue raisonne.
For more context
Compare Walter Isaacson's popular 2017 biography, or Kenneth Clark's classic study, for other routes into the same restless mind.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Daniel Arasse
- Publisher
- Konecky & Konecky
- Place of publication
- Old Saybrook, Connecticut
- Year
- 1998
- ISBN
- 1-56852-198-7
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine
Added from photo pass