Matthew Landrus examines 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, he addresses 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. He has published widely on the work and contexts of Leonardo da Vinci, though he also studies Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, historiography, paradoxes in visual culture, and the histories of aesthetics, figural proportions and colonial culture.
Academic 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
This course will examine scientific and technical applications developed by Western artists and visual theorists from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. Concentrating on pictorial traditions, the course will address what artists, authors and artist/engineers have referred to as scientific, technical, mechanical, and purely mental solutions to optical, proportional and quantitative visual problems. General themes will be perspective, form, color, and mechanical devices, and will include discussions on intellectual training, notebooks, treatises, and collecting. The course will examine artists such as Masaccio, Leonardo, Piero della Francesca, D|rer, Serlio, Carlo Urbino, Cigoli, Rubens, Vel`zquez, Saenredam, Vermeer, Poussin, Andrea Pozzo, Canaletto, Phillip Otto Runge,Turner, Delacroix, Monet, and Seurat.
This course will explore the approaches and contexts of Leonardo da Vinci's draftsmanship. Studying some of his surviving 6000 drawings and notes, we shall locate his aesthetic and analytical processes in the context of a broad range of projects, such as paintings, sculpture, treatises, machines, weapons, maps, festivals, built environments, and philosophical propositions. Nature and the natural sciences will be considered as presented in the drawings of Leonardo. Leonardo's adherence to artisanal traditions, to members of princely courts and republics, to a Classical ideal, and more generally to investigative and inventive strategies will be considered.
