One of the most fully achieved human beings who has ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is recognized the world over as a figure of infinite curiosity, feverish imagination and sublime artistic ability. This updated edition of our XL title provides the most comprehensive survey of the life and work of this master painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, and inventor. Its catalogue raisonne of Leonardo's paintings covers both his surviving and his lost painted works. With full-bleed details of many paintings, the reader is able to inspect the subtlest facets of brushworks that came to revolutionize Art History. A further catalog of Leonardo's drawings arranges nearly 700 of his drawings by category (architecture, technical, proportion, cartography, etc) and showcases his fabulous observational finesse, from anatomical studies to architectural plans, from complex engineering designs to pudgy infant portraits. It includes a fresh chapter exploring the artist's mesmerizing manuscripts. The accompanying account of Leonardo's life and work includes a special in-depth exploration of his masterworks The Annunciation and The Last Supper.

Author Biography

Johannes Nathan studied art history at New York University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1995 with a dissertation on the working methods of Leonardo da Vinci. He is the author of numerous art publications, director of Nathan Fine Art (Berlin and Zurich) and teaches art history at the Technische Universitat, Berlin. Frank Zoellner wrote his doctoral thesis on motifs originating from Antiquity in the history of art and architecture of the Medieval and Renaissance periods (1987). He is also the author of a postdoctoral treatise on motion and expression in the art of Leonardo da Vinci, published in 2010. He has published numerous works on Renaissance art and art theory, and on 20th-century art. Since 1996 he has been Professor of Medieval and Modern Art at the University of Leipzig. For TASCHEN he has authored the XL monographs on Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.