a woman with deep set eyes, her face is detailed but her body is a simply sketched

A 23-year excavation into the life of Leonardo da Vinci

Met curator Carmen Bambach reveals what she has learned about the world’s most famous Renaissance man.

Curator Carmen Bambach lauds Leonardo’s Head of a Young Woman for its psychological and artistic prowess. A study for his painting, Virgin of the Rocks, the drawing combines both high polish and minimal sketching.

Biblioteca Reale, Turin, Piedmont, Italy / © Musei Reali di Torino / Bridgeman Images

Carmen Bambach, curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, spent 23 years studying the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. The culmination of her research, a 2,200-page, four-volume book, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, will be published by Yale University Press this summer.

In an interview at the Met, Bambach described what she calls the “archaeological method” she used to excavate details about Leonardo: she studied the intricacies of his handwriting; transcribed and translated the artist’s words herself instead of relying on previously published translations; and read the same books Leonardo read in their original form. Rather than focus on a single theme (anatomy or engineering) or on

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