...Johannes Endres Hans Blumenberg’s, frequently oblique, reflections on art rank among the most erudite in twentieth-century theories of art. The following investigations focus especially on his views on the visual arts as they unfold from his critical reception of Leonardo da Vinci’s art and science...

... attempt to make Leonardo da Vinci relevant for the French poet’s age. Comparing Blumenberg’s comments on contemporary art with those in US formalist art criticism (Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried) provides a unique constellation of later modernist thinking on the plastic arts (painting and sculpture...

... follows a sixteenth-century Persian tapestry on loan to the Princes Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, one of the most treasured objects in the collection, along with Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine , stolen by the Nazis in 1939. The tapestry was eventually returned, only to be stolen again and disappear...

..., Freud takes direct aim at the Aristotelian thesis underwriting the entire debate and writes, in his Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood: “So far as we know, the curiosity [Wissbegierde] of children of this age does not awaken spon- taneously.”6 With this sentence, Freud completely...

... acknowledged that aggressive instinctual behavior could also be sublimated, when it came to its aesthetic expression, as classically demonstrated in his 1910 study of Leonardo da Vinci, the sexual drive predominated. 20 In the passages just quoted from Minima Moralia and “Resignation,” however...

... influenced by Paul Valéry. In “Hans Blumenberg and Leonardo” Johannes Endres shows that Blumenberg’s reading of Valéry aims at an aesthetic as well as at a scientific appraisal of the modern age. Both of these aspects are represented in the figure of Leonardo da Vinci, to whom Valéry repeatedly returned...

... on the earlier translation in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–51. Selected Writings and Illumi- nations are hereafter cited as SW and I, respectively. 20 Aura and Charisma actually received the brushstrokes of Leonardo da Vinci or Pierre-Auguste...

... to the Republic of Croatia in 1973 in exchange for a generous annuity. Yet the so-called masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Diego Velásquez, among others, were quickly exposed as mostly fakes by the art journalist Andrew Decker.6 Mimara was even fea- tured in Thomas Hoving’s best-selling book...

...,” one needs to examine them from this angle.36 Surely, no one will mistake the ecological posthumanists’ agglomerative, chimerical human for the Vitruvian man—but in his desire to present the human nakedly, stripped of mythological conceits, Leonardo da Vinci is nevertheless recognizable...