The man who fell to earth
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1334578,00.html
Charles Nicholl's clear-eyed new life of Leonardo da Vinci sees
Renaissance Man in a baser, more human light, says Peter Conrad
Sunday October 24, 2004
The Observer
Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind
by Charles Nicholl
Penguin/Allen Lane £25, pp640
No man is a hero to his valet or his biographer, and Charles Nicholl,
in this bright, cunning, intrepidly intelligent biographical study,
has startlingly demystified his enigmatic subject. Nineteenth-century
historians canonised Leonardo as a universal intelligence, the
embodiment of the superhuman aspiration that impelled the Renaissance.
In The Reckoning, Nicholl examined the career of another reckless
spiritual rebel, Christopher Marlowe, entangling this Faustian
transgressor in a sordid Elizabethan underworld of thuggery, buggery
and treason. He has done something equally brisk and disrespectful to
Leonardo.
It's true, as his subtitle concedes, that Leonardo nurtured an
Icarus-like dream of flight, designing a velocopter and studying bat
wings as a prototype for a manned fly ing-machine. Nevertheless,
Nicholl grounds him. Flight, he argues, is not necessarily the
Renaissance man's desire to reclaim equality with the angels; it may
also signify, as it does for the rest of us, a fugitive longing to
evade responsibility and interrupt work - 'flights semantically
referrable to as fleeing rather than flying'.
Leonardo da Vinci
http://news.google.com/news?q=%20%22Leonardo%20da%20Vinci%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Leonardo+da+Vinci%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&tab=nw&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Leonardo+da+Vinci%22&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_epq=Leonardo%20da%20Vinci&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
.
|
