All copies of this title, including those transferred to portable devices and other media, must be deleted/destroyed at the end of the lending period.
Description
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. He detects the siren voice that so often lured the great artist into the arms of science - Leonardo's fascination with anatomy, first as the basis for his paintings and then as the crucial component in his aim to systematize all knowledge of nature. 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.
As opposed to the traditional chronological biography, this loosely organized treatise examines both what is and what is not known about the great master. Scott Brick's comfortable voice sounds genuinely interested as it guides us though the evidence from which we must surmise how the gifted thinker solved nature's riddles and created monumental art. The narration becomes noticeably tumescent when describing Da Vinci's dissections of penile blood supply. Unfortunately, Brick's tendency to vary his voice from loud to very soft sometimes results in the loss of important words. And Nuland's antiquated Freudian ideas about homosexuality should have died with the great Viennese shrink. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
