Questo sito utilizza cookie tecnici, analytics e di terze parti.
Proseguendo nella navigazione accetti l'utilizzo dei cookie.

Preferenze cookies

Leonardo da Vinci, Extraordinary Genius: from Art to Science

In anticipation of the 2019 celebration of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, the Georgetown University Italian Research Institute, in collaboration with the Embassy of Italy, the Italian Cultural Institute, the Georgetown University Department of Italian, and the Department of Art & Art History is sponsoring a symposium on the great Renaissance master’s scientific work that underlines his extraordinary creativity and intellectual acumen.

 

FEATURING

Professor Francesca Fiorani 
Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities 
Professor of Art History 
University of Virginia

“Leonardo da Vinci’s Painting and Arab Optics”

Professor Rodolfo Maffeis 
Assistant Professor of Art History 
Politecnico di Milano, Department of Design

“The Painter and the Moon: Cosmology Issues in Leonardo da Vinci’s Manuscript”

 

INTRODUCTION

Dean Christopher S. Celenza, Ph.D., Dr.phil.,
Professor of History and Classics
Georgetown College

 

MODERATOR

Professor Alfred Acres 
Wright Family Term Associate Professor 
Department of Art and Art History 
Georgetown University

 

LOCATION 

Lohrfink Auditorium 
Georgetown University 
McDonough School of Business, 2nd Floor 
3700 O Street NW 
Washington, DC, 20002

 

Events at Georgetown University, Italian Research Institute: click here

  

Registration

 

RSVP: CLICK HERE

 

 

  

PROFESSOR FRANCESCA FIORANI

ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES

PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

 
francesca fioraniFrancesca Fiorani, Professor of Art History and Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities at the University of Virginia, received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Rome, La Sapienza. An expert on the relationship between art and science in Renaissance and Baroque Europe, she has written extensively on the representation of space, cartography, mapping, art theory, and Leonardo da Vinci. 

She is the author of The Marvel of Maps. Art, Cartography and Politics in Renaissance Italy (Yale University Press, 2005), which received a Special Mention for the Premio Salimbeni per la Storia e la Critica d’Arte and was translated into Italian as Carte dipinte. Arte, cartografiae politica nel Rinascimento (Franco Cosimo Panini, Modena, 2010).

She is the co-editor (with Alessandro Nova) of Leonardo’s Optics: Theory and Pictorial Practice(Marsilio Editore, Venice 2013), and the director of Leonardo da Vinci and His Treatise on Painting, a digital publication focused on the formation and reception of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century (treatiseonpainting.org).

She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council for the Learned Societies, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, the Getty Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Institute, and the Warburg Institute. She is currently completing a book on Leonardo da Vinci’s painting and art theory considered from the point of view of artistic practice, optics, philosophy, and culture.

Abstract

Leonardo da Vinci’s Painting and Arab Optics

A discussion on Leonardo da Vinci’s knowledge of ancient and medieval optical writings since his early training years, when the artist painted and drew a lot but wrote very little, at least according to the survived archival record. It combines the analysis of Leonardo’s early works with an examination of optical writings that were available in the vernacular in the late fifteenth century. From this inferential investigation, Leonardo da Vinci emerges as an attentive reader of Arab optics, especially of the works by the Arab philosopher Ibn al-Haytham, and his planned Book on Painting, which was published only posthumously and through the mediated compilation of one of his assistants, as an artistic adaptation of Arab optical treatises. Five hundred years after his death (Leonardo died in 1519), the art theory of this iconic figure of western culture emerges as deeply indebted to Arab optical science in both form and content.

 

PROFESSOR RODOLFO MAFFEIS

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY

POLITECNICO DI MILANO, DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN

 
rodolfo maffeis photoProf. Rodolfo Maffeis received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Florence in 2007. His research interests include the work of Leonardo da Vinci: notably the master’s writings on astronomy and his strategies of visualization of celestial bodies. Prof. Maffeis also specializes in early modern art, with a focus on Renaissance and Baroque Italian painting. 

His research addresses Florentine artists, their connections with the Medici court, and the broader context of literary and scientific culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He curated a monographic exhibition on the painter Francesco Furini at Palazzo Pitti, Florence (2007), co-authored the catalogues of Giambologna (2006), Artemisia Gentileschi (2011), Antonio Balestra (2016), and published a book on Benedetto Luti and Arcadian Rome (2012).

Before joining the Politecnico di Milano (2015), he was a Fellow at the Roberto Longhi Foundation of Art History Studies in Florence, at the Veneto Institute of History, Art & Letters in Venice, at the Italian Institute of Philosophica Studies of Naples, at the  Kunsthistorisches Institut – Max-Plack-Institut,in  Florence; and was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He is a member of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) and of the Società Italiana di Storia della Critica d’Arte (SISCA). He has presented his research at various conferences such as at the (RSA 2014, Politecnico di Milano 2015). He has published  conference proceedings (KHI-MPI 2015) on Leonardo studies, and has contributed to Leonardo da Vinci’s exhibition catalogues (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, 2011; Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2015).

 

PROFESSOR ALFRED ACRES

WRIGHT FAMILY TERM ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

DEPARTMENT OF ART AND ART HISTORY

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

 
alfred acresProfessor Alfred Acres is Chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Wright Family Term Associate Professor in Art History. A specialist on Netherlandish art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, his research, publications, and teaching also address Italian, German, and French art. His recent book, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy (Brepols, 2013), explores how and why countless European images of Christ’s infancy allude either to his death or the devil, and sometimes to both. In this study and among his articles (in Art Bulletin, Artibus et Historiae, and numerous edited volumes), he addresses ways in which artists of the period shaped new dimensions of pictorial realism as instruments of meaning and persuasion. He is currently writing a book on Jan van Eyck. He was awarded the College Art Association’s Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize and held the Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Professor Acres joined the Georgetown faculty in 2006, having taught previously at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oregon, and Princeton University.

 

  • Organizzato da: Georgetown University Italian Research Institute
  • In collaborazione con: Please see text above