This handsome gold-embossed hardback presents extracts from Leonardo da Vinci's famous notebooks, richly illustrated with more than 100 full-color facsimile images. Combining Leonardo's famous mirror writing with the most beautifully detailed drawings and sketches, these extracts are divided into sections on art, anatomy, the physical sciences, designs, philosophy and his personal letters and allegorical writings. In his own words, you will learn about the intricacies of painting techniques, the nature of flight, the practical concerns of engineering and much more besides. With an extended biographical introduction adapted from Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1568), this book brings to life this polymath and genius who was truly the quintessential 'Renaissance Man'.