Martin Kemp has written and broadcast extensively on imagery in art and science from the Renaissance to the present day.
Leonardo da Vinci has been at the centre of this endeavour, and has been the subject of a number of his books and exhibitions, including Leonardo (Oxford University Press 2004). His wider research has involved the sciences of optics, anatomy and natural history in various key episodes in the history of naturalism. In 1989 he published The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale University Press).
Increasingly, he has focused on issues of visualization, modelling and representation. The broad thrust of more recent work is devoted to a "New History of the Visual," which embraces the wide range of artefacts from science, technology, and the fine, applied and popular arts that have been devised to create models of nature and to articulate human relationships with the physical world. A scientific diagram or computer graphic model of a molecule is as relevant to this new history as a painting by Michelangelo. He writes a regular column on “Science in Culture” in the science journal Nature, an early selection of which has been published as Visualisations (OUP, 2000). Many of the themes of the Nature essays are developed in Seen and Unseen (OUP 2006), in which his concept of “structural intuitions” is explored. Forthcoming books include The Human Animal (Chicago).
He was trained in Natural Sciences and Art History at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute, London. He was British Academy Wolfson Research Professor (1993-98). For more than 25 years he was based in Scotland (Universities of Glasgow and St. Andrews, where he was Provost of St. Leonard’s College). He has held visiting posts in Princeton, New York, North Carolina and Los Angeles.
He has curated a series of exhibitions on Leonardo and art and science, including Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery in London. He was also guest curator for ca 1492 at the National Gallery in Washington in 1992. He has served as a Trustee of National Galleries of Scotland, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum.
Leonardo da Vinci has been at the centre of this endeavour, and has been the subject of a number of his books and exhibitions, including Leonardo (Oxford University Press 2004). His wider research has involved the sciences of optics, anatomy and natural history in various key episodes in the history of naturalism. In 1989 he published The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale University Press).
Increasingly, he has focused on issues of visualization, modelling and representation. The broad thrust of more recent work is devoted to a "New History of the Visual," which embraces the wide range of artefacts from science, technology, and the fine, applied and popular arts that have been devised to create models of nature and to articulate human relationships with the physical world. A scientific diagram or computer graphic model of a molecule is as relevant to this new history as a painting by Michelangelo. He writes a regular column on “Science in Culture” in the science journal Nature, an early selection of which has been published as Visualisations (OUP, 2000). Many of the themes of the Nature essays are developed in Seen and Unseen (OUP 2006), in which his concept of “structural intuitions” is explored. Forthcoming books include The Human Animal (Chicago).
He was trained in Natural Sciences and Art History at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute, London. He was British Academy Wolfson Research Professor (1993-98). For more than 25 years he was based in Scotland (Universities of Glasgow and St. Andrews, where he was Provost of St. Leonard’s College). He has held visiting posts in Princeton, New York, North Carolina and Los Angeles.
He has curated a series of exhibitions on Leonardo and art and science, including Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery in London. He was also guest curator for ca 1492 at the National Gallery in Washington in 1992. He has served as a Trustee of National Galleries of Scotland, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum.