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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

From Library Journal
Although Marani addresses the whole of da Vinci's fragmentary and limited oeuvre and then some, this volume is in no way a traditional catalogue raisonn?. With a profound familiarity with the relevant scholarship and a keen sensitivity to the paintings, this volume is nevertheless partial and idiosyncratic in its treatment and definition of the master's work. While sharply aware of the paintings' nuances, graphic analogs, and relationship to Renaissance and antique art, the author betrays an inattention to compositional and pictorial innovation, iconographic content, and the problem of the non-finito, which diminishes this work's value as an introductory text. Similarly, the influence of classical sculpture on the later paintings, an important topic worthy of some discussion, is overemphasized. Despite a comprehensive gathering of excellent reproductions, this is a necessary acquisition only for collections serving advanced students of Vinciana.ARobert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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