Joost Keizer Livres

Piero della Francesca's approach to painting revolutionized the art world by emphasizing a methodical use of perspective, creating an illusion of reality in his works. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he focused on capturing the essence of things as they are, rather than relying solely on imaginative expression. His unique style set him apart in fifteenth-century culture, highlighting a blend of realism and poetic inspiration that redefined artistic conventions of the time.

Leonardo da Vinci lived an itinerant life. Throughout his career – from its beginnings in the creative maelstrom of fifteenth century Florence to his role as genius in residence at the court of the king of France – Leonardo created a kind of private universe for himself and his work.Leonardo also spent a great deal of time away from his easel, pursuing his interest in engineering, natural science, sculpture, poetry, fables, music, and anatomy. In the time that another artist would finish a series of paintings, he would work on one. Sometimes a painting would take decades, accompanying him on his travels as he worked on other commissions.Leonardo's private world was both vibrant and active. It sometimes did and at other times did not interact with the wider world. But what emerged from it has established Leonardo as the definition of the Renaissance Man.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was one of the preeminent figures of the Italian Renaissance. He was also one of the most paradoxical. He spent an incredible amount of time writing notebooks, perhaps even more time than he ever held a brush, yet at the same time Leonardo was Renaissance culture’s most fanatical critic of the word. When Leonardo criticized writing he criticized it as an expert on words; when he was painting, writing remained in the back of his brilliant mind.In this book, Joost Keizer argues that the comparison between word and image fueled Leonardo’s thought. The paradoxes at the heart of Leonardo’s ideas and practice also defined some of Renaissance culture’s central assumptions about culture and that there is a look to script, that painting offered a path out of culture and back to nature, that the meaning of images emerged in comparison with words, and that the difference between image-making and writing also amounted to a difference in the experience of time.