Volume 11, Number 10 · December 5, 1968
In Search of Leonardo
By Ernst Gombrich
Leonardo da Vinci
by V.P. Zubov, translated by David H. Kraus, with a Foreword by Myron P. Gilmore
Harvard, 325 pp., $9.95
The 1964 volume of Isis, the official quarterly of the History of Science Society, opens with a tribute to Vassilii Pavlovich Zubov who had posthumously been awarded the Society's George Sarton Medal for 1963 for his outstanding contributions to the history of science. Born in 1899 in the vicinity of Moscow, Zubov must have received his schooling before the Revolution. He spoke and wrote fluent French and also corresponded in perfect German. Having read History and Philosophy at the University he soon found employment with the Academy of Sciences, becoming the chief scientific advisor to its Library at the age of thirty-two. His main publications before the war concerned the history of architectural theory in the Renaissance. He translated into Russian the great treatise by Leone Battista Alberti on Architecture, adding the first detailed commentary to this important text of which traced the ancient and medieval sources; he did the same for the sixteenth-century commentary on Vitruvius' ancient treatise on architecture by Paladio's patron, the Aristotelian philosopher Daniele Barbaro. It would be hard to think of an enterprise more typical of 'cloistered scholarship' than such a commentary on a commentary published in the worst period of Stalinist terror.
Review, 2862 words
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