“... (Payne) has the gift, as does John Keegan, of using prose to elevate facts, figures, dates and events into the realms of the dramatic.” —Book Reviewer Based on entirely fresh primary research. Leonardo presents important new information and perspectives on one of the most interesting men and greatest geniuses of all time. The following are only a few of the new and controversial findings offered by Payne in this highly readable book. The portrait of a bearded man universally accepted as a self-portrait is actually a drawing of Leonardo’s father. The subject of the Mona Lisa was not the wife of a merchant but the Duchess of Milan. (Among the illustrations in the book are two earlier, seldom-seen Mona Lisas.) Leonardo was not the son of a peasant woman, as it is generally thought he was, but of a high-born woman. Payne paints an extraordinarily convincing Picture of Leonardo not only as a giant of his age, but also as a man, human, real, simple and natural. Besides dispelling many myths about him, the author places his subject realistically in his own time—the summit of the Italian Renaissance with its wars and sudden upheavals, its unsurpassed artists and architects, its ambitious and often warring princes. Leonardo is a meticulously accurate book and it reads like a swiftly paced novel.
Psychobiography is often attacked by critics who feel that it trivializes complex adult personalities, "explaining the large deeds of great individuals", as George Will wrote, "by some slight the individual suffered at a tender age - say, seven, when his mother took away a lollipop". Worse yet, some writers have clearly abused psychobiography - for instance, to grind axes from the right (Nancy Clinch on the Kennedy family) or from the left (Fawn Brodie on Richard Nixon) - and others have offered woefully inept diagnoses (such as Albert Goldman's portrait of Elvis Presley as a "split personality" and a "delusional paranoid"). And yet, as Alan Elms argues in Uncovering Lives, in the hands of a skilled practitioner, psychobiography can rival the very best traditional biography in the insights it offers. Elms makes a strong case for the value of psychobiography, arguing in large part from example. Indeed, most of the book features Elms's own fascinating case studies of over a dozen prominent figures, among them Sigmund Freud (the father of psychobiography), B.F. Skinner, Isaac Asimov, L. Frank Baum, Vladimir Nabokov, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Saddam Hussein, and Henry Kissinger. These profiles make intriguing reading. For example, Elms discusses the fiction of Isaac Asimov in light of the latter's acrophobia (fear of heights) and mild agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) - and Elms includes excerpts from a series of letters between himself and Asimov. He reveals an unintended subtext of The Wizard of Oz - that males are weak, females are strong (think of Scarecrow, Tin Man, the Lion, and the Wizard, versus the good and bad witches and Dorothy herself) - and traces this in part to Baum'schildhood heart disease, which kept him from strenuous activity, and to his relationship with his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, a distinguished advocate of women's rights. And in a fascinating chapter, he examines the abused childhood of Saddam Hussein, the privileged childhood of George Bush, and the radically different psychological paths that led these two men into the Persian Gulf War. Elms supports each study with extensive research, much of it never presented before - for instance, on how some of the most revealing portions of C.G. Jung's autobiography were deleted in spite of his protests before publication. Along the way, Elms provides much insight into how psychobiography is written. Finally, he proposes clear guidelines for judging high quality work, and offers practical tips for anyone interested in writing in this genre. Written with great clarity and wit, Uncovering Lives illuminates the contributions that psychology can make to biography. Elms's enthusiasm for his subject is contagious and will inspire would-be psychobiographers as well as win over the most hardened skeptics.
This book meditates on the nature of biography and the way biographers habitually explain their subjects' loves by reference to psychology, ancestry, childhood experience, social relations, the body, or illness.
A visionary scientist, a supreme painter, a man of eccentricity and ambition: Leonardo da Vinci had many lives. Born from a fleeting affair between a country girl and a young notary, Leonardo was never legitimized by his father and received no formal education. While this freedom from the routine of rigid and codified learning may have served to stimulate his natural creativity, it also caused many years of suffering and an insatiable need to prove his own worth. It was a striving for glory and an obsessive thirst for knowledge that prompted Leonardo to seek the protection and favour of the most powerful figures of his day, from Lorenzo de’ Medici to Ludovico Sforza, from the French governors of Milan to the pope in Rome, where he could vie for renown with Michelangelo and Raphael. In this revelatory account, Antonio Forcellino draws on his expertise – both as historian and as restorer of some of the world’s greatest works of art – to give us a more detailed view of Leonardo than ever before. Through careful analyses of his paintings and compositional technique, down to the very materials used, Forcellino offers fresh insights into Leonardo’s artistic and intellectual development. He spans the great breadth of Leonardo’s genius, discussing his contributions to mechanics, optics, anatomy, geology and metallurgy, as well as providing acute psychological observations about the political dynamics and social contexts in which Leonardo worked. Forcellino sheds new light on a life all too often overshadowed and obscured by myth, providing us with a fresh perspective on the personality and motivations of one of the greatest geniuses of Western culture.
As he examines the changing views of Leonardo since the sixteenth century, A. Richard Turner both gives the reader a cultural history in brief of western Europe during this period and provides a context for examining Leonardo's relevance to our own ways of perceiving and interpreting the world.
Famous in his time as a painter, prankster, and philosopher, Leonardo da Vinci was also a musician, sculptor, and engineer for dukes, popes, and kings. What remains of his work-from futuristic designs and scientific inquiry to artwork of ethereal beauty-reveals the ambitious, unpredictable brilliance of a visionary, and a timeless dreamer. Robert Byrd celebrates this passionate, playful genius in a glowing picture book replete with the richness and imagination of Leonardo's own notebooks. Twenty lavish spreads, including side drawings, supplemental texts, and quotes from Leonardo's writings, highlight distinct periods and make the master's art, jokes, explorations, and inventions wonderfully vivid and accessible. A striking tribute to an irrepressible mind and to the potential within all who are curious.
A quick internet search will yield results of Leonardo da Vinci’s legendary paintings, the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, and you might even catch a glimpse of his well-known sketches of machines, human bodies, and animals. However, there’s so much more to da Vinci than his paintings and drawings. This 16th-century Italian man embodied the Renaissance spirit — he was intensely interested in everyone and everything. His curiosity spanned every discipline, from geometry to anatomy to the link between art and science. 500 years ago was a time of insight, of investigation, and in this sense, da Vinci fit in perfectly. However, in another sense, he didn’t belong at all — he was a loner living in his own world. An illegitimate child with 17 half-siblings, Leonardo also shrouded himself in secrecy. He wrote in a mirror script, meaning that you could only understand what he had written by holding it up to a mirror. He believed that we all have potential to do amazing things, but he also had lots of unfinished projects and struggled with lifelong self-doubt. Delve in to these pages to find out why Leonardo di Ser Piero d’Antonio di Ser Piero di Ser Guido da Vinci — yes, this was his full name — was as mysterious as his painting of Mona Lisa’s famous smile.
