Career
Leonardo da Vinci has been the subject of books written by him, including Leonardo (Oxford University Press 2004, rev.2011). He has published on imagery in the sciences of anatomy, natural history and optics, including The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale University Press).
Increasingly, he has focused on issues of visualization, modelling and representation. He has written a regular column on “Science in Culture” in Nature (an early selection published as Visualisations, OUP, 2000). The Nature essays are developed in Seen and Unseen (OUP 2006), in which his concept of “structural intuitions” is explored. His most recent book is Christ to Coke: How Image becomes Icon (OUP, 2011). Several of his books have been translated into various languages.
He was trained in Natural Sciences and Art History at Cambridge University (Downing College) and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He was British Academy Wolfson Research Professor (1993–98). For more than 25 years he was based in Scotland (University of Glasgow and University of St Andrews). He has held visiting posts in Princeton, New York, North Carolina, Los Angeles and Montreal.
He has curated a series of exhibitions on Leonardo and other themes, including Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery in London, Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006 and Seduced: Sex and Art from Antiquity to Now, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2007. He was also guest curator for Circa 1492 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1992.
In 2000, he advised skydiver Adrian Nicholas as he constructed a parachute according to Leonardo’s drawings from materials which would have been available in his day. In 1485 Leonardo had scribbled a simple sketch of a four-sided pyramid covered in linen. Alongside, he had written: "If a man is provided with a length of gummed linen cloth with a length of 12 yards on each side and 12 yards high, he can jump from any great height whatsoever without injury."
In June 2000, Nicholas launched himself from a hot air balloon 10,000 ft over South Africa. He parachuted for five minutes as a black box recorder measured his descent, before cutting himself free of the device and releasing a conventional parachute. Leonardo's parachute made such a smooth and slow descent that the two jumpers accompanying Nicholas had to brake twice to stay level with him.
His projects include:
- Leonardo da Vinci. Experience, Experiment and Design"
- an exhibition about how Leonardo thought on paper. It contains some of his most complex and challenging designs. Although many other artists, inventors and scientists have brainstormed on paper, none of his predecessors, contemporaries or successors used paper quite like he did. The intensity, variety and unpredictability of what happens on a single sheet are unparalleled. This project was last exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from 14 September 2006 to 7 January 2007.
- Universal Leonardo
- A project aimed at deepening our understanding of Leonardo da Vinci through a series of international exhibitions, scientific research and educational resources. A web site is available for details of the ongoing exhibitions and to discover Leonardo's fascinating thought and work in the realms of art, science and technology: http://www.universalleonardo.org
In 2010 he published a monograph together with French engineer Pascal Cotte, recounting the story of how a team of experts - under his guidance - pieced together the evidence for the extraordinary discovery of a major artwork by Leonardo, now named La Bella Principessa. The book, entitled La Bella Principessa. (2010), narrates the steps Kemp and Cotte took in authenticating the painting, including the use of forensic methods usually reserved for criminal investigation, matching a fingerprint found on La Bella Principessa to the great Renaissance master. The Italian edition Mandragora (2012), produces evidence about its origins.
As Emeritus Professor at Oxford University, he is now full-time writing, speaking and broadcasting. He is currently working on an internet edition of Bill Gates' Leonardo manuscript, the Codex Leicester.
Read more about this topic: Martin Kemp (art Historian)
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