Leonardo and the Age of the Eye

First USA printing, Near Fine cloth hardcover in Very Good dustjacket. 288 pages, top edge blue. "The most relentlessly curious man in history". This book deals with Leonardo the investigator and the inventor, rather than with Leonardo the artist. The discovery in Madrid in 1967 of lost parts of Leonardo's notebooks and the public exhibition at Buckingham Palace of his drawings from the Windsor Collection have emphasized again his qualities as a scientist and his inventive ingenuity. The scinetist and artist saw reality in nature. His dissections, his observations and his experiements amounted to heresies questioning the Creation, saying the sun does not move, and deriding the spirit world. He foresaw that the ingenuity of man could create a depersonalized monster for his own destruction.