This volume contains most of the papers given at a colloquium held at the Institute in 1997. It provides a study of the concept of composition in European art and art literature from the middle ages to the early 20th-century. Some authors are concerned to show the extent to which writers on art before 1880 would have been able to think of a work of art in the terms put forward by modernist theorists like Maurice Denis, Wassily Kandinsky and Clement Greenberg, as a flat surface, covered with colours, lines and forms arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way. Other authors aim to show how artists and theorists conceived of composition before the modern period, by describing some of the implications and connotations of the concept within a broader field of political and religious meanings.

Jean Seznec's "La survivance des dieux antiques" was first published at the Warburg Institute in 1940 and translated into English as "The Survival of the Pagan Gods in 1953". It is a classic survey of the afterlife of the deities of classical Antiquity in art and literature during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This volume of essays is the product of a conference held at the Warburg Institute in 2004, in collaboration with the French research group Polymnia. It presents the current state of scholarship regarding a number of the themes set out by Seznec, covering areas from medieval astronomy to sixteenth-century allegory, and charting the course of the long-term iconographical traditions of mythological figures as well as discussing individual transformations of classical deities at specific moments in time. As in Seznec's book, the late-medieval and Renaissance mythographical handbooks which were the principal sources of knowledge about classical mythology for contemporary artists form an overarching topic.

This incisive and illuminating biography follows the three themes that shaped the life of Leonardo da Vinci and, through him, forever changed Western art and imagination: nature, art, and self-fashioning. Nature and art helped form Leonardo. He spent his first twelve years in the Tuscan countryside before entering the most reputed artistic workshop of Florence. There he blossomed as one of the most promising painters of his time and promptly applied his skills to explore and question the world through science and invention. Leonardo was also self-fashioned: he received only a basic education and grew up around peasants and artisans. But from the 1480s onwards, he transformed himself into a court artist and became a familiar of kings and rulers. Following the chronology of Leonardo's extraordinary life, this book examines Leonardo as artist, courtier, and thinker, and explores how these aspects found expression in his paintings, as well as in his work in sculpture, architecture, theater design, urban planning, engineering, anatomy, geology, and cartography. Francois Quiviger concludes with observations on Leonardo's relevance today as a model of the multidisciplinary artist who combines imagination, art, and science--the original, and ultimate, Renaissance Man.