The Shadow Drawing

Book excerpt: “Insightful and beautiful. . . . A wonderful study of how Leonardo’s art and science are interwoven.” —Walter Isaacson, author of Leonardo Da Vinci A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Shortly after Leonardo da Vinci’s death, his peers and rivals created the myth of the two Leonardos: there was Leonardo the artist and then, later in life, Leonardo the scientist. In this pathbreaking biographical interpretation, the art historian Francesca Fiorani tells a very different and much more interesting story. Taking a fresh look at Leonardo’s celebrated but challenging notebooks and other sources, Fiorani shows that Leonardo became fluent in science when he was still young man. As an apprentice in a Florence studio, he was especially interested in the science of optics. He aspired to use this knowledge to capture—as no artist before him had ever done—the interior lives of his subjects, to paint the human soul in its smallest, tenderest motions and vicissitudes. And then he hoped to take one further step: to gather his scientific knowledge together in a book that would be even more important than his paintings. In The Shadow Drawing, Fiorani revises our understanding of Leonardo the artist’s most renowned paintings and reconstructs the wisdom Leonardo the author hoped to impart. The result is both a stirring biography and a bold reconsideration of how the Renaissance understood science and art—and of what was lost when the two were sundered. “Fiorani’s lively intellectual adventure gives us new understanding and appreciation of Leonardo’s cross-fertilization of art and science. It is a perceptive biography of Leonardo exploring the frontiers of science but also a brilliantly informative guide to his paintings.” —Ross King, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome, Leonardo and the Last Supper, and Mad Enchantment