Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci – painter of the Mona Lisa, a visionary designer of flying machines and the illustrator of the ideally proportioned human being – is world famous for being a genius, the prototypical Renaissance Man. In contrast to this standard portrayal, Volker Reinhardt discovers an artist who, above all, lived against his time: against the wordloving humanists, against the world-shunning Christians, against the belief of alchemists in the hidden forces of nature. For Leonardo the only thing that mattered was what the eye saw and his mission was to become the eye of the world through seeing, drawing, and painting. Leonardo grew up in Florence, worked in Verrocchio’s workshop, as a court artist in Milan, as a war engineer for Cesare Borgia and then spent a luxurious retirement at the court of the French king. The stages of his life have been thoroughly documented and yet are still full of riddles: why did he rarely finish a work and why did he prefer reversed or mirror writing? Who is the Mona Lisa? Are the mountains in the background of that painting secret soul landscapes? Volker Reinhardt has re-read Leonardo’s notebooks, which have been largely neglected by art historians, and is able to correct some of the assumptions about his life and work. Above all, however, he tries to reinstate Leonardo’s compromised outsider status and gives him back his secrecy. Because the aura of the mystery with which Leonardo surrounded himself was, as this profound, brilliantly written book demonstrates, one of his most successful works.