Here are 66 books that Leonardo Da Vinci fans have personally recommended if you like
Leonardo Da Vinci.
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A practising artist for more than 60 years, my main source of inspiration is people and the natural world. I work in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Drawing is the foundation of my art and I always keep a sketchbook handy. As a left-hander in a right-handed world, drawing became my main means of expression from an early age, when I instinctively wrote back-to-front with my left hand but was made to use my right. In addition to my art practice, I have taught drawing and developed a teaching method based on 7 principles that are outlined in Draw Like da Vinci.
Hokusai, my favorite artist, described himself as "the man mad about drawing." Mad about drawing myself, I never cease to learn from studying his woodblock prints. This publication contains a rare collection of Hokusai’s original brush drawings. Most of his countless originals were lost when they were glued to a woodblock during the printing process. This book covers the scope of Hokusai’s subject matter of landscapes, flora and fauna, everyday life, and the supernatural, and reveals his sense of humor. I consider Hokusai ‘The Leonardo of the East’ – both artists drew everything with masterful skill and shared a common humanity. Hokusai’s skill with brush alone is phenomenal. He creates subtle tones, expressive movement and varies the thickness of his line down to a single hair.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) is considered by many to be Japan’s greatest artist. During his seventy-year career, he produced a considerable oeuvre of some 3,000 color prints, illustrations for over 200 books, hundreds of drawings, and over 1,000 paintings. This exciting collection of 103 exquisite small drawings were made for an unpublished book called The Great Picture Book of Everything – featuring wide-ranging subjects from depictions of religious, mythological, historical, and literary figures to animals, birds, flowers, and other natural phenomena, as well as landscapes. They are dominated by subjects that relate to ancient China and India, also Southeast and Central…
A practising artist for more than 60 years, my main source of inspiration is people and the natural world. I work in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Drawing is the foundation of my art and I always keep a sketchbook handy. As a left-hander in a right-handed world, drawing became my main means of expression from an early age, when I instinctively wrote back-to-front with my left hand but was made to use my right. In addition to my art practice, I have taught drawing and developed a teaching method based on 7 principles that are outlined in Draw Like da Vinci.
I discovered the extraordinary artist Rosalba Carriera when I saw an exhibition of her pastel portrait drawings in Venice a decade ago. She has perfected the art of pastel drawing with a technique that is so skillful that the transition in color and tone is undetectable – she virtually paints with pastel. I find her portraits as good as the oils by famous artists. Rosalba Carriera deserves to be better known – I was thrilled when this book on her life and work was published in English in 2020. Studying her work helped me to understand the limitless possibilities with pastel and to improve my own technique.
The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757): The Queen of Pastel is the first extensive biographical narrative in English of Rosalba Carriera. It is also the first scholarly investigation of the external and internal factors that helped to create this female painter's unique career in eighteenth-century Europe. It documents the difficulties, complications, and consequences that arose then -- and can also arise today -- when a woman decides to become an independent artist. This book contributes a new, in-depth analysis of the interplay between society's expectations, generally accepted codices for gendered behaviour, and one single female painter's astute strategies…
A practising artist for more than 60 years, my main source of inspiration is people and the natural world. I work in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Drawing is the foundation of my art and I always keep a sketchbook handy. As a left-hander in a right-handed world, drawing became my main means of expression from an early age, when I instinctively wrote back-to-front with my left hand but was made to use my right. In addition to my art practice, I have taught drawing and developed a teaching method based on 7 principles that are outlined in Draw Like da Vinci.
This is an exceptional book on Kollwitz’s drawings with outstanding reproductions of rarely seen works. I find Kollwitz’s humanity deeply moving. As an Expressionist, she champions the plight of the poor and oppressed, especially women and children. Working in the mediums of sculpture and drawing, Kollwitz is a master, or rather a mistress of the human form. A sculptor myself, I appreciate the depth of form in her figure drawing and her use of broad strokes to define planes.
A practising artist for more than 60 years, my main source of inspiration is people and the natural world. I work in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Drawing is the foundation of my art and I always keep a sketchbook handy. As a left-hander in a right-handed world, drawing became my main means of expression from an early age, when I instinctively wrote back-to-front with my left hand but was made to use my right. In addition to my art practice, I have taught drawing and developed a teaching method based on 7 principles that are outlined in Draw Like da Vinci.
I have a deep admiration for the art of indigenous Australians with their connection to nature and mother earth. I grew up in outback Australia near a pre-historic sacred site with an awe-inspiring cave drawing of a giant serpent. This book, written by several scholars, is a comprehensive resource on Aboriginal art. The illustrations cover traditional bark paintings and cave drawings, some dating back more than 30,000 years. The authors’ analysis of symbols is informative. I consider Aboriginal artists to be the first anatomists. Long before Leonardo, they were drawing the inner structures and organs of humans and animals.
Although I have been a professional artist for over forty years, I have never yet gotten to the point where I imagine I have it all figured out. There are always new techniques to learn, and new mediums to explore. The books on this list are ones I have found helpful in nudging me in new and productive directions.
British illustrator Patrick Woodroffe was an eclectic virtuoso, working with equal facility in oils, acrylic, pencil, pen and ink, silverpoint, and a unique technique of his own involving cutout drawings photographed in natural settings. Like McMullan’s, this book gives you a practical look inside one artist’s creative process. One remark of Woodroffe’s helped set me free artistically: “I don’t think strict accuracy is important, for if art is to offer us anything at all that is not to be found ‘out there’ or in photographs, then it can only come from those fortunate instances when the artist sees something not quite straight, when his visual memory fails him just a little. Getting it at least slightly wrong is I believe what art is all about.”
I fell in love with art when I was 14 on a trip to Florence with my parents. From that moment on there was hardly an exhibition in London I didn’t go and see. Over the last 20 years, I have made scores of documentaries (Art Safari) and podcasts (Art Bust) about art and written books that explore how the arts and culture intersect with economics, society, and politics. I love to research and tell stories about art: behind the most beautiful objects there often lie the most intriguing of tales, where intellect and imagination collide with ambition, greed, and vanity.
This is a slim volume, which stands out amidst the thousands of books on aspects of Leonardo, for its focus and unusual team of authors. Written by two brothers, one a professor of drawing, the other of medicine, it walks the reader through Leonardo’s anatomical drawings and their far-reaching influence on both science and art.
The authors are particularly good at sorting out what Leonardo got from previous students of anatomy, from the Greeks onwards, and what was new that he brought to, or took away from the dissection table, where he claims to have examined over thirty corpses.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) created many of the most beautiful and important drawings in the history of Western art. Many of these were anatomical and became the yardstick for the early study of the human body.
From their unique perspectives as artist and scientist, brothers Stephen and Michael Farthing analyse Leonardo's drawings - which are concerned chiefly with the skeletal, cardiovascular, muscular and nervous systems - and discuss the impact they had on both art and medical understanding.
Stephen Farthing has created a series of drawings in response to Leonardo, which are reproduced with commentary by Michael, who also provides…
I’ve always been besotted with crime fiction. As a journalist in Scotland, I got to experience real-life crime on a daily basis. And the world of cozy crime fiction became a very valuable, indispensable escape for me. So, when it came to coming up with my characters for The Bingo Hall Detectives, I knew that I had to create a cast, a setting, a mystery even, that would take me out of the relentlessness of the real world and into the confines of a bloody good read. And I’m so glad I did. The Bingo Hall Detectives series is very dear to me and I’m very lucky to be able to bring it to readers.
And when I first learned of the wonderful SJ Bennett’s series where her lead detective is Queen Elizabeth II, I was completely sold.
What I love most about this novel, and the series as a whole, is that there’s a wonderful story, cast of supporting characters, and everything, really, that support that simply brilliant concept. Look beyond the fact that the Queen is your protagonist and it’s a completely brilliant novel.
The fantastic, unique, and utterly compelling twist on the sleuth, however, is the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake.
For fans of The Crown and The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. On a perfect Spring morning at Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth II will enjoy a cup of tea, carry out all her royal duties . . . and solve a murder.
'Like an episode of The Crown - but with a spicy dish of murder on the side' (DAILY MAIL) ______________________
The morning after a dinner party at Windsor Castle, eighty-nine-year-old Queen Elizabeth is shocked to discover that one of her guests has been found murdered in his room, with a rope around his neck.
Astronomy teaches us that our bodies are quite literally star stuff, chemical elements made inside exploding stars. For much of my life, I studied and researched astronomy in universities, and in observatories on remote and beautiful mountain tops and in space. I explored the cosmos for its own sake, but I came to realise also that we are literally and metaphorically a part of the Universe, not apart from it. Just as the science of astronomy has done for me, these novels put humanity against the same backdrop: cosmic lives seen through women’s eyes.
Caroline Herschel was the sister of William Herschel, a church organist and piano tutor, latterly the discoverer of the planet Uranus, a mapper of the skies, and an astronomer at the court of King George III. At first, she devoted herself to her brother, acting as his housekeeper, musical accompanist, and PA in Bath and then as his scientific assistant in Slough, near Windsor Castle. She submerged her own volition to his. But gradually she found her own life in astronomy, and discovered 8 comets, pooh-poohed as small by the King but much appreciated by Queen Charlotte and her ladies. She became known internationally in her own right. She lived to a considerable old age in Hannover, where she was born. The book is a fictionalised but real-life story that echoes between the eighteenth century and our own time.
This is a story of love and astronomy; music and silence; secrets and truth-telling; of world-changing discoveries, and unrequited desire. Moving from York in the 1780s to Regency Bath, and then to Hanover in the 1840s, it concerns the lives of three people-all astronomers. There is Caroline, torn between her passion for music and her passion for the stars; John, deaf from childhood, whose extraordinary mathematical gifts afford him perspectives not available to others; and Edward, friend and mentor to Caroline and to John, who must conceal his innermost feelings from them both. All three find fulfilment in the heavens…
All my life, I have had a passion for history and, the moment I came upon Queen Victoria while browsing the history section in the local library, I was hooked! Far from being the dour Widow of Windsor, it was clear that she was a highly-intelligent, forward-thinking, often amusing, and often amused woman, with fascinating relatives and connections across the whole world. Her family life mirrored that of any ordinary family, with its ups and downs, its petty squabbles, and a myriad of contrasting characters, each with a unique and interesting story to tell. With so many avenues yet to explore, this is a passion that could last a lifetime!
This lovely book dispels the myth that, after Albert’s death, Queen Victoria spent forty years in Windsor Castle in perpetual mourning, as it describes her delight in her many holidays on the Cote D’Azur. The book introduces the Queen’s companions, John Brown and the Munshi, alongside many other well-known characters of the era, including the infamous Leopold II of the Belgians. "Oh, if only I were at Nice, I should recover!" she said during her final illness, and it is unsurprising that, at the time of her death, her aides were forced to cancel the plans she had made for her next visit to her beloved Riviera.
Queen Victoria fell in love with the Riviera when she discovered it on her first visit to Menton in 1882 and her enchantment with this 'paradise of nature' endured for almost twenty years. Victoria's visits helped to transform the French Riviera by paving the way for other European royalty, the aristocracy and the very rich, who were to turn it into their pleasure garden. Michael Nelson paints a fascinating portrait of Victoria and her dealings with local people of all classes, statesmen and the constant stream of visiting crown heads. In the process, we see an unexpected side to Victoria:…
After completing a psychology degree, I became an interventions facilitator in a prison and worked with offenders who'd committed serious violent crimes. It was while I was in this role that my fascination for criminal psychology grew. Once I left the profession, I put my experiences to good use in fiction, going on to write The Serial Killer series of three psychological thrillers. With the most recent, The Serial Killer’s Sister, I incorporated my love of puzzles and games into a twisted story of a serial killer who uses a childhood game known to his sister as ‘The Hunt’ to track her down and torment her.
With a creepy cover and an endorsement from Stephen King, this novel immediately grabbed my attention.
I’d say this was a psychological thriller with a crime element and a dose of horror and that mix really drew me into this book and kept me trapped within its pages. Together with the nostalgic 80s thread, this read is down as one of my all-time favourites.
The seemingly innocent chalk stick figures the kids leave for each other like a secret game only they can decode, begin to appear on their own with a more sinister message. A bone-chilling read!
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