SBMA Announces Newly-Published Book “The Young Leonardo” by Director Larry Feinberg
Weav ng together information drawn from a wealth of contemporary 15th – 16th-century documents and Leonardo’s own words and art, Feinberg brings the Renaissance genius to life as a real flesh and blood person who was very much the product of the times he lived in. Feinberg shows us that Leonardo’s real genius lay in the ways he synthesized current knowledge of the sciences—botany, biology, geology, optics, hydraulics, military engineering—with his own breathtakingly original imagination and creativity.
“…At last, we have a completely fresh and compelling look at the artist’s early years. The Young Leonardo brilliantly places the artist in the context of contemporary Florentine culture and society while giving us fascinating new insights into his thought processes and observations on the subjects and meanings of even his most enigmatic works. A complex, demythologized appreciation of the man and his genius emerges from this wonderfully written book.”
—Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Jackson Pollock, and Van Gogh: The Life
The book is available at the Museum Store at 1130 State Street, Santa Barbara.
Larry Feinberg has been the Director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art since 2008. Before coming to Santa Barbara, he was Curator of European Art at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1991 to 2008. He has also been a curator at The Frick Collection in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and at the Allen Art Museum of Oberlin College. Feinberg holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he specialized in Italian, especially Floren tine, 16th-century paintings and drawings. In addition to his specialty in Italian art, he also has expertise in 17th–19th-century French art. His publications include catalogues of the Italian and French paintings in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, and articles on Jean-Antoine Watteau, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Jacopo Pontormo.