Word: leonardo
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...LEONARDO DA VINCI (518 pp.; Reynal; $35) is one of those rare books that does justice to a man of genius. It is more than just big and beautiful, and its appeal does not stop with art lovers, for Leonardo may well have possessed the greatest creative intelligence in human history. The paintings alone (La Gioconda. The Last Supper, Portrait of a Young Woman) would have been quite enough to ensure his place in world art-and the major ones are here, in color, on pages large enough to illustrate his mastery, his humanity and his imaginative understanding...
...with a surgeon's tools, a chemist's swabs, and a burning curiosity about what lies under the next layer of paint, has moved into most of the world's great museums. At best, their efforts have resulted in such spectacular triumphs as the restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper (TIME, Oct. 4, 1954). But all too often their scientific zeal has destroyed what it was meant to preserve. Last week the simmering battle of science v. art came to a boil in the letters columns of London's Times...
...Italian pictures particularly are being skinned alive by restorers." Other letters pointed out various masterpieces in London's National Gallery which may have ceased to be masterpieces through too much cleaning. Among them: pictures by Giovanni Bellini, Botticelli, Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, and even Leonardo's great Virgin of the Rocks. Leonardo's figures, wrote one angry correspondent, "are now bathed in a light only seen on the faces of the dead; or the neon lighting of a coffee...
...university town of Leiden, The Netherlands, 350 years ago this week, a prosperous miller and his wife celebrated the birth of a son destined to tower over the painters of the northern Renaissance as Leonardo da Vinci towered over the masters of the Italian Renaissance. To mark the anniversary, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum (State Museum) is staging an exhibition of 100 of the greatest paintings and 123 etchings by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, chosen from 63 collections, including Leningrad's world-famous Hermitage (see color pages). At the same time, Rotterdam's Boymans Museum is exhibiting...
...reasons for Rembrandt's continuing appeal is that he inhabits a world in which modern man can still find his bearings. Leonardo da Vinci, born 154 years earlier, raised painters to the level of princes, held court while he worked to the accompaniment of music and brilliant conversation; his Venuses were meant to grace Olympian festivals. Rembrandt, whose parents saw to it that he got a good Latin-school education, plus a taste of university life, preferred the company of his sturdy Dutch countrymen. He once chose to paint his bride Saskia in the trappings of classic mythology...