The Life of Leonardo da Vinci

A new translation of Georgio Vasari's Life of Leonardo da Vinci, supplemented with colour illustrations for the first time, and edited by one of the world's leading Leonardo scholars.
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Famous Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550 and 1569) is a classic of cultural history. A monumental assembly of artists' lives from Giotto to Michelangelo, it paints a vivid picture of the progress of art in the hands of individual masters. No Life is more vivid than that of Leonardo, a near-contemporary of Vasari – not even Vasari's account of Michelangelo, whom he knew and idolized.
This beautiful edition offers a literary translation that respects the 16th-century Italian, transposing Vasari's vocabulary into its modern equivalent. Martin Kemp is an eminent scholar, who has written on the vocabulary of Renaissance writings on art, and has co-translated Leonardo on Painting and Leonardo's Codex Leicester.