Leonardo Da Vinci: A Life (Penguin Lives Biographies)
The life and work of the great Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) have proved endlessly fascinating for generations. In Leonardo da Vinci, Sherwin Nuland completes his twenty-year quest to understand an unlettered man who was a painter, architect, engineer, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. What was it that propelled Leonardo's insatiable curiosity? Nuland finds clues in his subject's art, relationships, and scientific studies-as well as in a vast quantity of notes that became widely known in the twentieth century. Scholarly and passionate, Nuland's Leonardo da Vinci takes us deep into the first truly modern, empirical mind, one that was centuries ahead of its time.
Sherwin Nuland, M.D., is the author of bestselling nonfiction titles including How We Die, for which he won the National Book Award. He is clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also teaches medical history and bioethics.
Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
Published: United States, 1 January 2005
Format: Paperback / softback, 176 pages
Age Range: 15+
Other Information: Illustrations, unspecified
Dimensions: 13 x 1.3 x 18 centimeters (0.12 kg)
Writer: Sherwin B Nuland
About the AuthorSherwin Nuland, M.D., is the author of bestselling nonfiction titles including How We Die, for which he won the National Book Award. He is clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also teaches medical history and bioethics.
ReviewsSay what one will about Edna O'Brien's ravishing clip job of Joyce, Peter Gay's moderate Mozart or Edmund White's microcosmic Proust, the editors at Penguin Lives have a knack for matching up free-thinking meditators and their subjects. A surgeon and a writer about medicine, Nuland (How We Die) uses much of his brief bookÄlimited in size and scope to the series's quick-take, authorially inflected formatÄto explain the prodigal da Vinci as pioneering anatomist. The first 11 pages detail Nuland's personal obsession with da Vinci; the later pages describe da Vinci's concern with human and animal anatomy, and review the bibliographical jumble of his surviving notebooks and papers. Nuland's da Vinci is tireless, perhaps sublimated, in his intellectual and artistic activity, finishing few canvases (one the Mona Lisa, another The Last Supper) and almost nothing else during a long life largely financed, sometimes erratically, by patrons who indirectly supported an expensive retinue of friends, assistants and servants. He emerges as a compulsive investigatorÄof geometry, optics, hydraulics, architecture, sculpture, painting, botany, biology, military mechanics and the flight of birdsÄmoving from city-state to city-state in Italy, encountering ruler after ruler who sought to harness his gifts. Yet perhaps unforgivably, given the series's promise of New Yorker profile-like effervescence, da Vinci as personality slips away; what we get is a clean condensation of the facts. Only the final chapter, "Matters of the Heart and Other Matters," injects some of Leonardo's own fervor, in an in-depth look at one of his abiding obsessions, the structure and function of the human heart. Nuland's account is solid, but lacks enough of the flourish that its subject so effortlessly achieved and, that, on a much smaller scale, the Lives series seems to strive for. 4 illus. BOMC, QPB, History Book Club selections. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Nuland is the author of the best-selling How We Die and clinical professor of surgery at Yale, where he teaches medical history and ethics. In this "Penguin Life" biography, his characteristically nonacademic, essay-like style is interspersed with clearly labeled opinions about disputed topics regarding the artist's life, such as his sexual orientation and activity. Nuland devotes the first 120 pages of his brief book to Leonardo's pursuit of life as what we would call a scientist. The remaining 50 pages are focused specifically on his works as an anatomist. Nuland chronicles Leonardo's insights and mistakes and discusses his place in the history of anatomical studies. Leonardo was the first to make many discoveries in science and anatomy, but few of his contemporaries ever knew of his achievements. Michael White's Leonardo: The First Scientist (LJ 8/00) also discusses Leonardo's scientific life but is longer and much more comprehensive. Nuland's book is written for a general audience and is a bit more accessible. If you can afford only one book, get the White. Otherwise, Nuland's is a good choice for public and college libraries. (Index not seen.) [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/00; BOMC selection.]DEric D. Albright, Duke Univ. Medical Ctr. Lib., Durham, NC Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
"[Nuland's] own professional expertise enables him to write with particular insight and authority." -**The New York Review of Books"In this brief life, Nuland summarizes Leonardo's achievements skillfully." -**Scientific American"Nuland's enthusiasm and knowledge make his story interesting and easy to read." -The Seattle Times