Winternitz, Emanuel Leonardo da Vinci As a Musician , New Haven, CT: Yale Univ Press, 1982.

Illustrated by Numerous Illustrations. Hard Cover. Very Good/Good. 4to 0300026315 Dust jacked some fading, small tears and creases to edges. Original cloth covered boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership inscription. xxv, 241 pages clean and tight. Although Leonardo da Vinci is the prototype of the universal genius, one aspect of his achievement is scarcely known today: Leonardo was a gifted musician. He invented ingenious musical instruments, wrestled with the concept of musical time, experimented in acoustics. Moreover he was admired by his contemporaries for his mastery of one of the most valued musical arts of his day, performing improvisations by singing and accompanying himself on his lira da braccio. While an enormous literature on Leonardo exists, this book is the first to analyze his musical activities. Emanuel Winternitz places him in the musical life of Florence and Milan, examining his exchange of ideas with distinguished contemporaries. He then discusses Leonardo's reputation as a performer, his designing of stage machinery for pageants and theatrical performances, and the musical riddles and rebuses he devised to amuse the court. Finally Winternitz considers Leonardo as a scientist of music. The notebooks show a great variety of instruments of Leonardo's invention: drums with mechanisms that change their pitch during performance, wind instruments with keys, a glissando flute modeled on the human trachea, and an elaborate stringed instrument called the viola organista. Leonardo's highly original ideas about the philosophy of music, which were intimately connected with his philosophy of painting, were set out in the Paragone, the introduction to his treatise on painting. In it Leonardo revealed his conception of music as figurazione delta core invisibili, "the shaping of the invisible." (Book ref. 127368)  £32.00

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