"Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style" brings together a distinguished group of experts on Leonardo and the Renaissance, examining the ethical underpinnings of art history. The seven essays articulate the complexity of ways in which style involved ethical considerations during the early modern period, and still involves us in its conundrums.

Looking at individual works and concepts, this fascinating collection covers subjects such as Leonardo's understanding of his role as a painter as that of a natural philosopher, his interests in visual perception and the understanding of visual sensations by the mind, how and why Leonardo's ideas on painting are at the core of art theory, how Leonardo addresses style in gendered terms, and 'style' as the historian's projection.

This volume will be of great interest to all those studying or with an enthusiasm for Renaissance art history, art theory, cultural studies and philosophy.

In Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies, Lyle Massey argues that we can only learn how and why certain kinds of spatial representation prevailed over others by carefully considering how Renaissance artists and theorists interpreted perspective. Combining detailed historical studies with broad theoretical and philosophical investigations, this book challenges basic assumptions about the way early modern artists and theorists represented their relationship to the visible world and how they understood these representations. By analyzing technical feats such as anamorphosis (the perspectival distortion of an object to make it viewable only from a certain angle), drawing machines, and printed diagrams, each chapter highlights the moments when perspective theorists failed to unite a singular, ideal viewpoint with the artist’s or viewer’s viewpoint or were unsuccessful at conjoining fictive and lived space. Showing how these “failures” were subsequently incorporated rather than rejected by perspective theorists, the book presents an important reassessment of the standard view of Renaissance perspective. While many scholars have maintained that perspective rationalized the relationships among optics, space, and painting, Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies asserts instead that Renaissance and early modern theorists often revealed a disjunction between geometrical ideals and practical applications. In some cases, they not only identified but also exploited these discrepancies. This discussion of perspective shows that the painter’s geometry did not always conform to the explicitly rational, Cartesian formula that so many have assumed, nor did it historically unfold according to a standard account of scientific development.

Dante's Commedia intensively influenced the concept of the afterlife for people in Italy. But how did artists react to Dante's imaginary world of images in their visual constructions of the Last Judgment? Based on cycles of wall paintings by artists from Giotto to Signorelli, the author shows how the Commedia altered the traditional picture theme of Judgment Day for the first time. Dante's landscape of the afterlife enabled painters to visualize new pictorial spaces that did not necessarily have a direct connection to the text, but make reference to it nevertheless. The consideration of this complex pictorial program that is undertaken in this book in turn opens up new ways of understanding the reception and interpretation of the Commedia, so that text and image enter into a productive dialogue.

Interest in fifteenth century French painting has grown considerably since it was originally revived by the exhibition "Primitifs francais" (French Primitives) a century ago. Forgotten personalities (Barthelemy d'Eyck, Andre d'Ypres, Antoine de Lonhy, Jean Hey, Jean Poyer, etc.) have been rediscovered, and there is renewed study of the activity of several interrelated artistic centres. This highly complex artistic geography is precisely what this study endeavours to map. The book is arranged in three parts. The first examines the interaction between the French courts and Paris in the period of International Gothic (1380-1435). The second explains how the ars nova (the Flemish illusionist style) spread and was selectively assimilated in France in the days of Charles VII and Louis XI (1435-1483). The third underlines the consolidation of a specifically French style based on Jean Fouquet's model and developed concurrently with the great rhetoricians under Charles VIII and Louis XII (1483-1515).