Artist, scientist, philosopher, genius. Leonardo da Vinci is arguably the most fascinating figure in recorded history, yet he is as mysterious to us today as the shadowy landscapes behind his celebrated subjects. Five years in the making, Serge Bramly’s biography, first published to great critical and popular success in France, seeks to reveal the man behind the legend. Bramly’s research through thousands of pages of Leonardo’s notebooks and accounts by contemporaries has resulted in the most fully rounded account we have of the life and times of the artist—from his illegitimate birth in the tiny village of Vinci to his death in the arms of the king of France. Though his father was a wealthy bourgeois, Leonardo was illegitimate and was apprenticed like any working-class child. Bramly brings to vibrant life the coming of age of the wildly talented yet unschooled boy amid the clamor and pageantry of fifteenth-century Florence. It was the city’s golden age and Lorenzo de’ Medici provided Leonardo‘s first taste of patronage. He came into his own as an artist and thinker under the Sforza in Milan, a family as addicted to intrigue as they were to the spectacles engineered by da Vinci. With the fall of the Sforza, Leonardo aligned himself and in turn with Cesare Borgia, Pope Leo X, and finally François I of France. Along the way we come to know the hidden Leonardo. The circumstances of his childhood have long eluded scholars, but Bramly’s detailed analysis of his disillusioned observations on birth and maternal care helps fill the gaps, exposing complex emotions that persisted well into Leonardo‘s old age. We see evidence of his passion for men; his long-standing relationship with the beautiful Salai, who came to him as a boy; his ongoing self-doubt. The author writes poignantly of Leonardo’s last years, when he faced death with the legacy of so many brilliant projects brought to life—but not to completion. With the patience of a master detective, Bramly demystifies the enigma of Leonardo. Revealed is a man who was stigmatized for his illegitimacy and buffeted by pious bigotry and political intrigue, but who nonetheless transcended the mundane trials of day-to-day life to embody the ideal of the Renaissance man.