In the original dust jacket. Board binding the same as the cover.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. 75 pages. Leonardo da Vinci was the living spirit of the Renaissance. He was its unconfirmed genius, years ahead of his rivals, restless, erratic, pulling his generation headlong into the modern age.Entirely self-taught, except for the artistic techniques he learned from Verrocchio, his pupil-master, Leonardo studied without letup until his death in 1519. In his dedication to what he called the ‘inner adventure’, he took little notice of political events or the wishes of his patrons, concentrating instead on his own vast programme of discovery in the arts and sciences. The range of this programme defies brief description. Sufficient to say. It included painting and drawing, music, architecture and city planning, anatomy, geometry, aviation, hydrology, and the military arts of conquest and fortification.In these pages we follow Leonardo’s career from his early life in Vinci, his apprenticeship in Verrocchio’s workshop, where he met his brilliant contemporaries Botticelli, Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi, and the years of maturity spent in the dazzling courts of Milan, Florence, Rome and France. More than 160 illustrations – over 70 of them in colour – portray the great patrons and ladies of the day, Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Medici family and Cesare Borgia, Isabella of Aragon and Beatrice d’Este, together with a magnificent selection of Leonardo’s own works and projects. These include “The Last Supper”, the “Mona Lisa”, both versions of the “Virgin of the Rocks”, studies for equestrian statues, and sketches for an armoured car, flying machines, and a method of walking on water.

This book offers a fascinating study of Leonardo’s universal genius, assembling a body of achievement which, even today, is viewed with wonder.