Leonardo: Shaping the Invisible

Released in time for the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci in 2019, this album celebrates a man who excelled in almost every scientific and artistic discipline—including music. The ever-imaginative vocal group I Fagiolini salute the Italian with music from all ages that links to his work in curious and varied ways. Tallis’ and Howells’ settings of the Salvator mundi recall the Italian’s extraordinary portrait of Christ, while Daniel-Lesur’s mystical “Le Jardin clos” highlights the emotional and religious ambiguities of Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist. The polymath’s The Vitruvian Man meets its match in the perfect proportions of Bach’s The Art of Fugue before Josquin’s interweaving choral lines, perhaps heard by Leonardo himself, unite the mathematical and aesthetic beauty of God’s creation.