Living with Leonardo

<i>Living with Leonardo</i> is a set of highly focused memoirs, a personal journey interwoven with historical research that encapsulates the authors relationship with Leonardo da Vinci over more than half a century. <br/><br/>We learn of his encounters with the vast population that surrounds Leonardo: great and lesser academics, collectors and curators, devious dealers and unctuous auctioneers, major scholars and authors and pseudohistorians and fantasists; but also how he has grappled with swelling legions of Leonardo loonies, walked on the eggshells of vested interests in academia and museums, and fended off fusillades of non-Leonardos, sometimes more than one a week. Kemp leads us through his thinking on the <i>Last Supper</i> and the <i>Mona Lisa</i>, retells his part in the identification of the stolen Buccleuch <i>Madonna</i> and explains his involvement with and his theories on the two major Leonardo discoveries of the last 100 years, one of which plummeted into controversy (<i>La Bella Principessa</i>), while the other underwent a rapid ascent into widespread acceptance (<i>Salvator Mundi</i>). We learn firsthand of the thorny questions that surround attribution, the scientific analyses that support the experts interpretations, and the continuing importance of connoisseurship. <br/><br/>Throughout, from the most scholarly interpretations to the popularity of Dan Browns <i>Da Vinci Code</i>, we are reminded of Leonardos rare genius and wonder at how an artist from 500 years ago continues to make such compelling posthumous demands on all those who engage with him.