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
PROFESSOR FRANCESCA FIORANI
ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES
PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
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
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