The Warburg Institute Leonardo da Vinci: Painting as Philosophy - Leonardo and Optics Speaker: Francesco Fiorani A conference was held to coincide with the exhibition at the National Gallery November 2011-February 2012. Focusing particularly on his paintings, papers will be asking how Leonardo set about expressing visually different and sometimes competing ideas about the universe and its causes, in a Christian era. What did Leonardo mean by promoting painting as a science, as knowledge, and how should we understand the scientific painting of traditional (or novel) devotional subjects? How did his theory of painting affect his treatment of secular commissions, such as portraiture? How did his thinking change? How did he react to classical thought and the ideas of his contemporaries and what impact did this have on his art? Speakers include Martin Clayton (Royal Library, Windsor), Frank Fehrenbach (Harvard), Francesca Fiorani (University of Virginia), Alessandro Nova (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence), Mary Pardo (University of North Carolina) and Robert Zwijnenberg (Leiden).