Illuminating Leonardo opens the new series Leonardo Studies with a tribute to Professor Carlo Pedretti, the most important Leonardo scholar of our time, with a wide-ranging overview of current Leonardo scholarship from the most renowned Leonardo scholars and young researchers. Though no single book could provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of Leonardo studies, after reading this collection of short essays cover-to-cover, the reader will come away knowing a great deal about the current state of the field in many areas of research. To begin the series, editors Constance Moffatt and Sara Taglialagamba present an impressive group of essays that offer fresh ideas as a departure point for future studies. Contributors include Andrea Bernardoni, Pascal Broist, Alfredo Buccaro, Francesco Paolo di Teodoro, Claire Farago, Francesca Fiorani, Fabio Frosini, Sabine Frommel, Leslie Geddes, Damiano Iacobone, Martin Kemp, Matthew Landrus, Domenico Laurenza, Pietro C. Marani, Max Marmor, Constance Moffatt, Romano Nanni, Annalisa Perissa-Torrini, Paola Salvi, Richard Schofield, Sara Taglialagamba, Carlo Vecce, Alessandro Vezzosi, Marino Viganò, and Joanna Woods-Marsden.

The second volume of Leonardo Studies offers an impressive overview of current Leonardo scholarship into two of his primary interests: nature and architecture. The authors consider Leonardo’s treatises and their aftermath, science experiments, and fields of art and science based on two abundant subjects.

This first complete English translation, including over 250 full-color images, is a longitudinal cultural history of how art came to be institutionalized in the history of western representational practices.

How an oddly attributed $19,000 picture proved to be a $100 million work by Leonardo da Vinci—a true art-world detective story In late 2010, art collector Peter Silverman revealed that a "German, early 19th century" portrait he had bought for $19,000 was, in fact, a previously unknown drawing by Leonardo da Vinci—an exquisite depiction of Bianca Sforza, rendered 500 years ago. In Leonardo's Lost Princess, Silverman gives a riveting first-person account of how his initial suspicions of the portrait's provenance were confirmed repeatedly by scientists and art experts. He describes the path to authentication, fraught with opposition and controversy. The twists and turns of this fascinating, decade-long quest lead from art history to cutting-edge science, and from a New York art gallery to Paris, Milan, Zurich, and ultimately a Warsaw library where the final, convincing evidence that the portrait was indeed by da Vinci was found. Takes an up-close look at the workings of the art world and at figures ranging from dealers and connoisseurs to a suspected forger Discusses current scientific techniques used to investigate and authenticate works of art, such as carbon dating and cutting-edge photography Uses Silverman's drawing as an entree into Leonardo da Vinci's world: his studio, his style, and his methods Explores the intersection of art and science in the authentication process, involving the work of a man who embodied that intersection Unearthing the secrets almost lost to history, the book is ideal reading for art lovers and anyone interested in an astounding case of "whodunit."

The true story of the Mona Lisa - the people behind it, how Leonardo painted it and what it meant to him, and its fortunes in the centuries since. Read this book and the world's most famous image will never look the same again.

Leonardo’s early life was spent in Florence, his maturity in Milan, and the last three years of his life in France. Leonardo’s teacher was Verrocchio. First he was a goldsmith, then a painter and sculptor: as a painter, representative of the very scientific school of draughtsmanship; more famous as a sculptor, being the creator of the Colleoni statue at Venice, Leonardo was a man of striking physical attractiveness, great charm of manner and conversation, and mental accomplishment. He was well grounded in the sciences and mathematics of the day, as well as a gifted musician. His skill in draughtsmanship was extraordinary; shown by his numerous drawings as well as by his comparatively few paintings. His skill of hand is at the service of most minute observation and analytical research into the character and structure of form. Leonardo is the first in date of the great men who had the desire to create in a picture a kind of mystic unity brought about by the fusion of matter and spirit. Now that the Primitives had concluded their experiments, ceaselessly pursued during two centuries, by the conquest of the methods of painting, he was able to pronounce the words which served as a password to all later artists worthy of the name: painting is a spiritual thing, cosa mentale. He completed Florentine draughtsmanship in applying to modelling by light and shade, a sharp subtlety which his predecessors had used only to give greater precision to their contours. This marvellous draughtsmanship, this modelling and chiaroscuro he used not solely to paint the exterior appearance of the body but, as no one before him had done, to cast over it a reflection of the mystery of the inner life. In the Mona Lisa and his other masterpieces he even used landscape not merely as a more or less picturesque decoration, but as a sort of echo of that interior life and an element of a perfect harmony. Relying on the still quite novel laws of perspective this doctor of scholastic wisdom, who was at the same time an initiator of modern thought, substituted for the discursive manner of the Primitives the principle of concentration which is the basis of classical art. The picture is no longer presented to us as an almost fortuitous aggregate of details and episodes. It is an organism in which all the elements, lines and colours, shadows and lights, compose a subtle tracery converging on a spiritual, a sensuous centre. It was not with the external significance of objects, but with their inward and spiritual significance, that Leonardo was occupied.