Martin Kemp

Martin John Kemp (born 5 March 1942) is a British art historian and exhibition curator who is one of the world's leading authorities on the life and works of Leonardo da Vinci. The author of many books on Leonardo, Kemp has also written about visualisation in art and science, particularly anatomy, natural sciences and optics. Instrumental in the controversial authentication of Salvator Mundi to Leonardo, Kemp has been vocal on attributions to Leonardo, including support of La Bella Principessa and opposition to the Isleworth Mona Lisa.

From 1995 to 2008 he was professor of art history at the University of Oxford and has continued since then as an emeritus professor. He previously held posts at University of St Andrews (1981–1995) and University of Glasgow (1966–1981). He holds honorary fellowships of both Trinity College, Oxford, and Downing College, Cambridge, and is a fellow of the British Academy.

Early life In his youth, Kemp attended Windsor Grammar School. From 1960 to 1963, he studied natural sciences and art history at Downing College, Cambridge, and the history of Western Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, from 1963 to 1965.

Career Sidebar with collapsible lists name = Martin Kemp Professorships title = resize|60%|Martin Kemp Professorships He was professor of Art History at the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008, during which he helped create the Centre for Visual Studies, which opened in 1999. Notably, Edgar Wind had held this post from 1955 to 1967 and subsequently Francis Haskell from 1967 to 1995. —and from 1993 to 1998 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1991. The course was also presented in-person at the Royal Institution in 2023.

Books Kemp has written many books about Leonardo da Vinci, his first of which, Leonardo da Vinci. The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man in 1981, won the Mitchell Prize in art history for best first book. He has published on imagery in the sciences of anatomy, natural history and optics, including The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale University Press). The art theorist and psychologist Rudolf Arnheim said that The Science of Art "may deserve to be called the definitive treatise on its topic" though its detail may make it difficult reading for non-specialists.

Kemp has written a regular column called "Science in Culture" in the scientific journal Nature. Selections of these columns have been published as Visualisations (OUP, 2000) and Seen and Unseen (OUP, 2006): the latter exploring his concept of "structural intuitions". Reviewing Visualisations, the historian of ideas Scott L. Montgomery described Kemp as like a "master gardener" who "for nearly two decades, [...] has helped shape this new field in major ways, planting a wide array of topics, arranging the colors of their importance, surveying and reconstituting the efforts of others, all the while adding original species of insight and subject matter." In 2011 he published Christ to Coke: How Image becomes Icon (OUP, 2011).

Salvator Mundi The Salvator Mundi is a painted wooden panel depicting Christ. It was exhibited in 2011 as an original work by Leonardo da Vinci, but the attribution has been controversial, with some scholars describing da Vinci as a contributor but not the main artist. Kemp's research supported its attribution to Leonardo. He said that as soon as he viewed the painting, he recognised the presence and "uncanny strangeness" of Leonardo's works. The painting was sold in 2017, setting a new record for the most expensive painting ever sold at public auction. In a 2019 book, Kemp identifies symbolism in the painting that is familiar from Leonardo's other religious paintings. produces evidence about its origins. Spectacular Bodies: the Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now at the Hayward Gallery, London (2001) (curated with Marina Wallace) A review of the exhibition catalogue described it as "a fascinating overview of the efforts over the past five centuries to understand the body through the intersecting lenses of art and science". Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2006) Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (2007) Hockney's Eye (co-curator) at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Downing College Heong Gallery, Cambridge (2022)

Selected bibliography reprinted with revisions in 1992.

As editor