Honorary Fellow

Martin Kemp

  • I was Professor of the History of Art at Oxford from 1995 to 2007.
  • I am an expert on the work of Leonardo da Vinci.
  • I have been an Honorary Fellow of Trinity since 2008.
Martin Kemp

Profile

I came to Trinity in 1995, when I became Professor of the History of Art at Oxford.  I started with Natural Sciences a Cambridge, and became an art historian via the Courtauld Institute of Art. The two sides of my education came together, more or less by chance, in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, on whom I have written too much. I have also written on other topics that refuse to obey disciplinary boundaries, including the optics of perspective and the illustration of anatomy. I have curated exhibitions on the Renaissance, art and anatomy, art and sex, and two on Leonardo. I also ran a regular column in Nature on science and culture for a good number of years. I seem to have published about 30 books, one third of which are on Leonardo. My latest is Visions of Heaven: Dante and the Art of Divine Light.