Inventing Leonardo: The Anatomy of a Legend

Inventing Leonardo is a brilliant wide-ranging study of Leonardo's place in cultural history and his relevance to our twentieth-century way of perceiving and interpreting the world. The book opens with a brief life of the artist. In the second section Turner examines a group of writers, artists and thinkers from Vasari, through Freud and Pater who have theorised about Leonardo. In the final section Professor Turner offers his own contribution to Leonardo criticism, juxtaposing themes from the artist's paintings and notebooks with present-day intellectual concerns.