Dentro l'immagine. Natura, arte e prospettiva in Leonardo da Vinci

The theory of vision, the perspective, and the “figural thinking” are recurrent themes in the philosophical and artistic doctrines between the 1400s and the 1500s, from Nicholas of Cusa to Marsilio Ficino, from Luca Pacioli to Albrecht Dürer. The present volume explores the fundamental role played by Leonardo da Vinci’s writing and pictorial work within this tradition of thinking. In Leonardo’s use of perspective, lights and shadows become emblems of the antithesis between knowledge and ignorance, while some of his most famous portraits evoke the opposition between the “divine proportion” and the chaos of the origins, between the serenity of the human face in the foreground and the threatening natural landscape in the background. These are but two examples of the typical propensity of Leonardo’s multifaceted genius, to express philosophical concepts in a figurative way.