Check out the following FIVE free, public Cinquecento and Leonardo da Vinci-themed events taking place at Carleton during the month of November.
Monday, Nov. 4: Performing Arts
SmarTalk Leonardo da Vinci
By Gruppo Jobel, an international organization founded in Rome in 1998
Jobel’s mission is to communicate cultural, technical, scientific, and commercial content through performing arts, visual arts and new technologies. For the first time in Canada, on the occasion of the 2019 Italian Language Week in the World, Leonardo’s captivating and yet mysterious personality will be told through the fusion of several disciplines: singing, dancing, storytelling and academic content. Lorenzo Cognatti, Jobel’s founder and creative director, wanted to paint Leonardo’s complex personality, showing him also as a woman. The event will be in English with sections in Italian to hear the Leonardesque language in its original form. Among the guest speakers is Carleton Prof. Angelo Mingarelli and three performers from Ottawa.
Wednesday, Nov. 13: Science Café
Leonardo’s Excursions into Mathematics
By Cinquecento Chair and Carleton Mathematics and Statistics Prof. Angelo Mingarelli
In this presentation, Prof. Angelo Mingarelli will explore Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452-1519) various excursions into the realm of mathematics (arithmetic and geometry and their applications). He will examine how da Vinci spent close to 20 years trying to “square the circle” and solve such other unsolvable problems that, of course, he didn’t know were unsolvable at the time.
Friday, Nov. 15: Cinquecento Lecture
The Alchemy of Geniuses: Leonardo and Other Polymaths of the Italian Renaissance
By Cristina Perissinotto, Associate Professor of Italian Studies & Director of the Italian Program, University of Ottawa
Why did the Italian Renaissance create so much beauty, and so many geniuses and polymaths? In this talk, Perissinotto shall encounter renowned geniuses, such as Leonardo da Vinci, as well as other Renaissance polymaths. She will attempt to find answers to the question above: why the preponderance of beauty in Renaissance art and cities, who were some of the polymaths of the Italian Renaissance, and why did this historical period produce so many?
Thursday, Nov. 21: Faculty of Science Herzberg Lecture 2019
Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi: The Story and the Research
By Martin Kemp, Emeritus Research Professor in the History of Art at Oxford University
Things are rarely straightforward with Leonardo. Myths proliferate. His rediscovered Salvator, revealed to the public for the first time in 2011, has already been engulfed by stories that have little to do with the picture itself. This lecture will provide an accurate account of its discovery, provenance, exhibition, reception and sale (for $450 million!), and will look at all aspects of the image in the contexts of Leonardo’s career, showing how it embodies his unique fusion of science, imagination, psychology and theology. It is this fusion that precludes its attribution to anyone other than Leonardo himself.
Monday, Nov. 25: Cinquecento Lecture
Anatomy, Geology and Their Influence on Leonardo’s Art
By Domenico Laurenza, a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florence
Laurenza will discuss how and why an artist turned into an anatomist and, at the same time, studied the earth like a scientist. He will dig deeper into what Leonardo’s scientific studies consisted of in these two fields, in which perhaps, as a scientist, he achieved the best results. These studies were the connections with his artistic work through the representation of the human figure and landscape, furthering the connections with his scientific research between the study of the human body or microcosm, and the study of the body of the earth or macrocosm. The lecture will try to provide an answer to these questions and will be an occasion of synthesis between the researches dedicated by Laurenza to Leonardo’s anatomical studies and, more recently, Leonardo’s geological work. In particular, with regard to this last field, the lecture will anticipate new evidences emerged during the preparation of the new edition of Leonardo’s Codex Leicester, currently in print (Oxford University Press).