As he examines the changing views of Leonardo since the sixteenth century, A. Richard Turner both gives the reader a cultural history in brief of western Europe during this period and provides a context for examining Leonardo's relevance to our own ways of perceiving and interpreting the world.

A. Richard Turner is Professor of Fine Arts at New York University and the author of The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy and co-author of The Art of Florence.

"This meticulous, intriguing, richly illustrated study contends that the image of Leonardo da Vinci—painter, engineer, inventor, anatomist, and Renaissance man—has been fashioned anew in each successive epoch."—Publishers Weekly

"Inventing Leonardo is a survey of—and a contribution to—the commentary that accumulated over the centuries to fill the void of unwritten autobiography and other credible knowledge about the artist's life. . . . [Turner] explains well some of the liberties of aesthetic speculation and some of the quandaries of art historical research, past and present. And in the book's last and most entertaining section, he invents some uses of his own for Leonardo's ambiguities."—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Review

"Inventing Leonardo is . . . the story of the inadvertent self-revelations of those, beginning with Vasari, who undertook to write about Leonardo. . . . This is a fascinating study."—Arthur Danto, New York Newsday

"A splendid new book about Leonardo. . . . Mr. Turner has done a lucid job of showing how Leonardo's reputation—and by implication, that of other artists—has been subjected to the vicissitudes of cultural politics and evolving social and esthetic ideals. He has given us a riveting portrait of an artist and a fascinating blueprint of the machinery of fame."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times