Leonardo’s record of unreliability was not simply because he decided to give up on certain paintings. He wanted to perfect them, so he kept hold of many of them for years, making refinements. Even some of his commissions that were completed, or almost so—Ginevra de’ Benci and the Mona Lisa, for example—were never delivered to clients. Leonardo clun

Unlike the Italian dukes and princes, French kings had collected very few paintings and almost no sculpture, and French art was greatly overshadowed by that of the Italians and Flemish. Francis set out to change that. He had the ambition, which he largely fulfilled,…

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Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also s

Of course, the things he did finish were enough to prove his genius. The Mona Lisa alone does that, as do all of his art masterpieces as well as his anatomical drawings. But by the end of writing this book, I even began to appreciate the genius inherent in his designs left unexecuted and masterpieces left unfinished. By skirting the edge of fantasy

These little books on his belt, along with the larger sheets in his studio, became repositories for all of his manifold passions and obsessions, many of them sharing a page.

When he returned to Florence in 1500, Leonardo set up a collaborative workshop, and production of some pictures, especially small devotional ones, became a team effort, just as it had been in Verrocchio’s studio.

“His insatiable curiosity, his restless leaps from one subject to another, have been harmonized in a single work,” Kenneth Clark wrote of the Mona Lisa. “The science, the pictorial skill, the obsession with nature, the psychological insight are all there, and so perfectly balanced that at first we are hardly aware of them.”

It was a good time for a child with such ambitions and talents to be born. In 1452 Johannes Gutenberg had just opened his publishing house, and soon others were using his moveable-type press to print books that would empower unschooled but brilliant people like Leonardo. Italy was beginning a rare forty-year period during which it was not wracked b

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