On the occasion of the V Centenary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci (1519-2019), the Italian Cultural Institute, in collaboration with the École de Langue of the Université Laval and the Québec Committee of the Dante Alighieri Society, is pleased to present the conference by Francesco Paolo Di Teodoro, “Leonardo da Vinci: the Vitruvian man“.
Tuesday October 1st 2019, 7pm
Université Laval
Pavillon Charles De Koninck, Hall 3157
Québec
Conference held in Italian
Leonardo da Vinci distinguished himself among his contemporaries also for the quality of the anatomical designs he had created, thanks to his direct participation in the dissection of corpses. Among the many known as the “Vitruvian Man” (Venice, Academy Gallery, f. 228), designed around 1490, a famous work, where the human body is inscribed in the circle and square, the perfect of plane geometry of two figures, considered by Leonardo together with mathematics the foundation of all-natural sciences. According to Leonardo own reflection on human proportion and architecture, made clear through words and image and drawing itself is a scientific art, illustrates what he believed to be a divine connection between the human form and the universe.
Francesco Paolo Di Teodoro is Professor of History of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Turin. Graduated in Florence, he taught at the School of Specialization in History of Medieval and Modern Art in Rome (La Sapienza) and was Professeur invité at the École pratique des hautes études (Paris). He deals mainly with modern art history and architecture (Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, Piero della Francesca, Donato Bramante, Leonardo, Raphael, Ammannati), the Vitruvian tradition and the critical edition of texts of historical and artistic interest, as well as that of the historical geometric drawing. He is the author (with Giorgio Cricco) of the best-known textbook of art history in use in Italian high schools and in the first two years of university (Bologna, Zanichelli). He was a fellow at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, he is an honorary member of the Raffaello-Urbino Academy and of the Accademia Clementina-Bologna. His latest book concerns Leonardo’s Del moto e misura dell’acqua (Zanichelli 2018). Co-curator of the Leonardesque exhibition in Turin (Royal Museums) and those of Raphael (Rome, Scuderie del Quirinale, Mantua, Palazzo Ducale…) is on the scientific committee of the Leonardo da Vinci exhibitions (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Palazzo Vecchio) and Venice (Gallerie dell’Accademia). He is a member of Leonardo’s scientific committee of several conferences and one of the organizers of the Paris (Leonardo e l’architettura) and Turin (Leonardo e le scienze dell’ingegneria), he is on the steering committee of the history and humanistic studies journals.