Presents the life and accomplishments of the famous artist, scientist, engineer, and inventor.

This first book in a two-volume history of the great artist covers his rise to prominence, an era during which her created the statue Pietà, the giant marble David, the Sistine Ceiling frescoes, the new sacristy and library for the Medici family at San Lorenzo, and the monumental tomb for Pope Julius II in Rome.

An animated introduction to the world's most famous Renaissance man, Leonardo Da Vinci: painter, mathematician, scientist, and engineer. Includes footage of his works.

In this revelatory account, Antonio Forcellino draws on his expertise-- both as historian and as restorer of some of the world's greatest works of art -- to give us a more detailed view of Leonardo than ever before. Through careful analyses of his paintings and compositional technique, down to the very materials used, Forcellino offers fresh insights into Leonardo's artistic and intellectual development. He spans the great breadth of Leonardo's...

"SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child...

Leonardo da Vinci is well known for his inventions as well as his art. But new evidence shows that many of his ideas were realized long before he sketched them out in his notebooks, some even 1700 years before him.

Michelangelo's breathtaking drawings. Very few artists can claim such lasting and worldwide fame and importance as Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). The nickname il divino (the divine one) has been applied to him since the 1530s right through to today: his achievements as a sculptor, painter, and architect remain unparalleled and his creations are among the best-known artworks in the world. This Bibliotheca Universalis edition is devoted to the...

"Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was a man of many talents--a sculptor, painter, architect, writer, and scholar--but he is best known for Lives of the Artists, the classic account that singlehandedly invented the genre of artistic biography and established the canon of Italian Renaissance art. Before Vasari's extraordinary book, art was considered a technical skill rather than an intellectual pursuit, and artists were mere decorators and craftsmen. It...

Natasha Leonova's beauty saved her life. Discovered on a freezing Moscow street by a Russian billionaire, she has lived for seven years under his protection, immersed in rarefied luxury, while he pursues his activities in a dark world that she guesses at but never sees. Her home is the world, often on one of Vladimir Stanislas's spectacular yachts manned by scores of heavily armed crew members. Natasha's job is to keep Vladimir happy, ask no questions,...

"A romp through the worlds of fashion, film, and titillating journalism that made 1950s Rome the sexiest capital on the planet. In the 1950s, Rome rose from the ashes of World War II to become a movable feast for film, fashion, creative energy, tabloid media, and bold-faced libertinism that made 'Italian' a global synonym for taste, style, and flair. Old money, new stars, fast cars, wanton libidos, and brazen news photographers created a way of life...