Peter Burke: The many faces of Leonardo

This lecture focusses on Leonardo as a polymath, a man of many skills and knowledges, one of the most extraordinary examples of an extraordinary intellectual species (even in the age of the ‘universal man’ of the Renaissance). Like other polymaths, Leonardo has often been remembered for only a fraction of his achievements.

Over the 500 years since his death, he has been remembered in many ways, as an artist, an inventor, and as an autodidact who made new discoveries in what would later become a range of academic disciplines such as optics, anatomy and geology. The history of the many views of Leonardo is almost as fascinating as the story of the man himself.

Peter Burke (*1937) ist einer der renommiertesten Kulturhistoriker unserer Zeit. Der britische Historiker und emeritierte Professor spricht über das äußerst facettenreiche Werk Leonardo da Vincis. Burkes Bücher wurden in eine Vielzahl von Sprachen übersetzt. Auf Deutsch sind z. B. erschienen: Montaigne zur Einführung (Junius, Hamburg 2004); Was ist Kulturgeschichte? (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2005); Die Explosion des Wissens. Von der Encyclopédie bis Wikipedia (Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2014). 

Burke ist u.a. Life Fellow des Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.