Paragone

Leonardo da Vinci's fame is based not solely on his innovative artistic oeuvre, but also on an unusually wide-ranging corpus of drawings, notes, reflections and treatises pertaining to almost every discipline of the day. In conjunction with other contemporary documents, this legacy allows a precise reconstruction of Leonardo's thinking and work, as well as his intellectual development. The large number of possible areas of focus (proportion theory, anatomy, optics, botany, architecture, engineering, philosophy, etc.) leads, however, to a fragmentation of research. The aim of this book is to bring together individual strands of Leonardo scholarship in terms of a contextualizing comparison, namely in the example of individual project areas - here in particular painting, architecture, engineering, military technology, hydrology and mechanics. In this spirit, the book takes its title from "Paragone", the term with which Leonardo's exploration of neighbouring arts and sciences can be described.