Book description
Leonardo is the greatest, most multi-faceted and most mysterious of all
Renaissance artists, but extraordinarily, considering his enormous
reputation, this is the first full-length biography in English for
several decades. Prize-winning author Charles Nicholl has immersed
himself for five years in all the manuscripts, paintings and artefacts
to produce an 'intimate portrait' of Leonardo. He uses these
contemporary materials - his notebooks and sketchbooks, eye witnesses
and early biographies, etc - as a way into the mental tone and physical
texture of his life and has made myriad small discoveries about him and
his work and his circle of associates. Among much else, the book
identifies what Nicholl argues is an unknown portrait of the artist
hanging in a church near Lodi in northern Italy. It also contains new
material on his eccentric assistant Tomasso Masini, on his homosexual
affairs in Florence, and on his curious relationship with a female model
and/or prostitute from Cremona. A masterpiece of modern biography.
Charles Nicholl's previous publications include The Reckoning: The
Murder of Christopher Marlowe (winner of the James Tait Black Prize for
Biography), Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa (Winner of the
Hawthornden Prize), The Fruit Palace and The Creature in the Map.
