500 Years of Leonardo, 1519-2019 — Living with Leonardo: Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond

Leonardo is a unique figure in the history of world culture, attracting analysis at the highest level and a huge proliferation of crazy ideas. The lecture will look at selected incidents from Martin Kemp’s engagement with Leonardo over 50 years to show how the “detached and objective’ business of historical research becomes immersed in an unmanageable context of myth and wild theories. The moral will be that how information emerges, from whom, when and where shapes its reception in both the scholarly and public arenas.

Professor Martin Kemp is renowned for his lifelong work on Leonardo da Vinci and more generally the relations between art and science.  He is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Oxford University and has written a column for many years on "Science in Culture" for Nature.  Professor Kemp has curated numerous exhibits on Leonardo and allied subjects in different parts of the world.  His publications includes Leonardo:  The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (1981), Leonardo (2005), La Bella Principessa (2010), and most recently Living with Leonardo:  Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond (2018). 

Copies of Professor Kemp's newest publication will be available to purchase, along with a period of book signing.