Leonardo, His Life and Works

“... (Payne) has the gift, as does John Keegan, of using prose to elevate facts, figures, dates and events into the realms of the dramatic.” 

—Book Reviewer


Based on entirely fresh primary research. Leonardo presents important new information and perspectives on one of the most interesting men and greatest geniuses of all time.

     The following are only a few of the new and controversial findings offered by Payne in this highly readable book.  The portrait of a bearded man universally accepted as a self-portrait is actually a drawing of Leonardo’s father.  The subject of the Mona Lisa was not the wife of a merchant but the Duchess of Milan.  (Among the illustrations in the book are two earlier, seldom-seen  Mona Lisas.) Leonardo was not the son of a peasant woman, as it is generally thought he was, but of a high-born woman.

     Payne paints an extraordinarily convincing Picture of Leonardo not only as a giant of his age, but also as a man, human, real, simple and natural.  Besides dispelling many myths about him, the author places his subject realistically in his own time—the summit of the Italian Renaissance with its wars and sudden upheavals, its unsurpassed artists and architects, its ambitious and often warring princes.  Leonardo   is a meticulously accurate book and it reads like a swiftly paced novel.


 Robert Payne (1911-1983) was born in Cornwall, U.K.  His father was English, his mother French.  He was educated at St. Paul's School in London and at the universities of Liverpool, Capetown in South Africa, Munich and The Sorbonne.  During his lifetime he had over a hundred books published on a wide range of subjects, the widest range of any known author.  He was known chiefly for his biographies and history books, among them Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Gandhi, Leonardo, Chaplin, the Christian Centuries, The World of Art.  He also wrote novels and poetry. Librarians loved him; critics raved about him.  Orville Prescott of The New York Times referred to him as “a literary phenomenon of astounding versatility and industry.”