Matthew Landrus

I examine intersections of the practical arts and natural philosophy during the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries. As a specialist on the working methods and intellectual interests of artist/engineers, I address cross-disciplinary solutions to investigative and inventive developments in the histories of ideas, science and technology. Much of this work addresses the histories of artisan notebooks and the art academy. Although I specialize on all aspects of approaches to Leonardo da Vinci, his contemporaries, his influences, and the reception of his work, I also study Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, historiography, paradoxes in visual culture, and the histories of aesthetics, figural proportions, and colonial culture, not to mention other areas of interest noted below.

ACADEMIC RESEARCH/AREAS OF INTEREST

Science and technology in visual art

Artist notebooks and publications

Preparatory marks on medieval and Renaissance drawings and paintings

Medieval through Early modern philosophy of natural history

Aesthetic paradoxes and the problem of art history

Mathematics and geometry in visual culture

Proportion theories and practices in 15th and 16th century Europe

Notes, drawings, and paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and his contemporaries

Civil and military engineering of medieval through early modern Europe

The history of representations of human and animal proportions

Painting in Europe around 1600

Music, festivals and the mechanical arts in Renaissance Europe

Turn of the twentieth century reception of Renaissance art and technology

Early modern colonial visual culture
Address: University of Oxford
Wolfson College
Oxford OX26UD