The European demographic system 1500–1820

Kemp neatly calls, the "fantasia", expressed by the painting of the Last Supper in which the perspectival illusion is interestingly explained. In the scientific field, similarly inspired ingenuity is found in Leonardo's geometrical transformations. The physiological truth so beautifully symbolized in the Leda and the Swan and the portrait of a Lady on a Balcony (the Mona Lisa) is here interpreted as "the procreative powers of all living things". This exemplifies the author's insight into the richness of Leonardo's mind. This book is full of insights which enrich the artistic interpretations offered; a feature which will make it exceptionally welcome to art historians. For historians of science it provides glimpses of the way from rigid mathematical exactitude into spatial transformations of the truth. This has been largely lost since algebra subjugated geometry as the chosen language of science. But spatial analysis was Leonardo's great and unique contribution to the unification of art and science. His every painting and drawing is charged with his science in the form of his physics of light and shade, perspective, and the geometry of forces acting on all objects, be they rocks or men. Martin Kemp's fluent expression of his awareness of this is to be warmly welcomed. Kenneth D. Keele Staines, Middlesex