Living with Leonardo: Fifty years of sanity and insanity in the art world and beyond

Martin Kemp, described by The Times as ‘the world’s leading authority on Leonardo’, relates his fifty-year relationship with the most famous artist of all time

In Living with Leonardo, world-renowned Leonardo da Vinci expert Martin Kemp relates his fifty-year relationship with the work of the most famous artist of all time.

Through an engaging personal narrative inter-woven with historical research, we learn of Kemp’s encounters with the vast population that surrounds Leonardo: great and lesser academics, collectors and curators, devious dealers and unctuous auctioneers, major scholars and authors, pseudo-historians and fantasists. He shares 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. Examining the greatest masterpieces, from the Last Supper to Salvator Mundi, through the expert’s eye, we learn first-hand of the thorny questions that surround attribution, the scientific analyses that support the experts’ interpretations, and the continuing importance of connoisseurship.

Throughout, from the most scholarly interpretations to the popularity of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, we are reminded of Leonardo’s unique 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.

Martin Kemp is professor emeritus of the history of art at Oxford University