Martin Kemp (art historian)

Martin Kemp is Emeritus Research Professor in the History of Art at Oxford University. He has written and broadcast extensively on imagery in art and science from the Renaissance to the present day. He speaks on issues of visualisation and lateral thinking to a wide range of audiences and is a leading expert on the art of Leonardo da Vinci.[1]

Contents

Career

Leonardo da Vinci has been the subject of books written by him, including Leonardo (Oxford University Press 2004). 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 writes 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 The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (Chicago). Several of his books have been translated into German.

He was trained in Natural Sciences and Art History at Cambridge University 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.

Two of his most recent 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 optician 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. The Profile Portrait of a Milanese Woman (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.

Bibliography

Art and Science

(and History of Science)

Leonardo da Vinci

vol I: ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ (from Dictionary of Art), pp. 40–60; ‘List of Dates’ (with Kenneth Clark), pp. 61–5 vol II: ‘From Scientific examination to the Renaissance Market: The Case of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder’, pp. 97–113. ‘Leonardo and the Space of the Sculptor’ (Lettura Vinciana in English), pp. 237–63; ‘Christo Fanciullo’, pp. 303–14; ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Science and the Poetic Impulse’, pp. 430–449. vol. III: ‘Leonardo verso 1500’, pp. 23–32’ ‘Leonardo’s Leda and the Blevedere River-Gods: Roman Sources and a New Chronology’, pp. 168–80; ‘Late Leonardo: Problems and Implications’, pp. 382–90. vol. IV: ‘Leonardo and the Visual Pyramid’, pp. 96–118; ‘In the Beholder’s Eye: Leonardol and the “Errors of Sight” in Theory and Practice’, pp. 123–135; ‘“Il concetto dell’anima” in Leonardo’s Early Skull Studies’, pp. 205–29; ‘Dissection and Divinity in Leonardo’s Late Anatomies’, pp. 230–65; ‘Analogy and Observation in the Codex Hammer’, pp. 345–77. vol. V: ‘The Crisis of Received Wisdom in Leonardo’s Late Thought’, pp. 81–96; ‘“A Chaos of Intellegence”: Leonardo’s “Traité” the Perspective Wars at the Académie Royale’, pp. 389–400.

Renaissance

(other than Leonardo and art and science)

in German as Der Blick hinter der Bilder. Text und Kunst in der italienischen Renaissance, Dumont, Cologne, 1997 (French and Italian translations awaited)

Contemporary

(excluding exhibition reviews)

Other periods and issues

References

External links