title: Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings
author:  Pietro C. Marani 
description: In this magnificent book, Pietro Marani, the director of the project to restore Leonardo da Vinci's <I>Last Supper</I>, presents all the artist's known paintings. The history and significance of each are analyzed at length: we read, for example, that "from a very early date, <I>Mona Lisa</I> was considered among Leonardo's most extraordinary accomplishments, one that made every other artist 'tremble and lose heart.'" Context is provided by a wealth of related paintings and sketches. The presentation is extravagant: double foldouts show frescoes in their entirety, and small areas are hugely expanded to give access to a world of sensuous detail. The intimacy of these extreme details--a tiny blue landscape glimpsed through a window, or the warm flesh of a baby's foot resting on its mother's arm--is unexpected, and one of the book's many successes.
zlib_text: **Annotation**
  
  Early in 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began work in Milan on what would become one
  of history's most influential and beloved works of art—The Last Supper. After
  a dozen years at the court of Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, Leonardo was
  at a low point personally and professionally: at 43, in an era when he had
  almost reached the average life expectancy, he had failed, despite a number of
  prestigious commissions, to complete anything that truly fulfilled his
  astonishing promise. His latest failure was a giant bronze horse to honor
  Sforza's father: his 75 tons of bronze had been expropriated to be turned into
  cannon to help repel a French invasion of Italy. The commission to paint The
  Last Supper in the refectory of a Dominican convent was a small compensation,
  and his odds of completing it were not promising: Not only had he never worked
  on a painting of such a large size—15' high x 30' wide—but he had no
  experience in the extremely difficult medium of fresco. In...
  
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