None

The pursuit of beauty and its opposite was one of the central themes of Leonardo da Vinci’s life. This book looks in detail at 75 drawings of the divinely beautiful and the grotesquely ugly from the unrivalled collection preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. In his introductory essay, Martin Clayton explores Leonardo’s life-long urge to create such drawings. Individual entries then look at each of the selected works, placing them in the context of contemporary attitudes to beauty, notions of perfect proportion, popular images of the comically ugly and accepted modes of artistic creation and social behaviour. With 149 illustrations, 92 in colour. “I recommend Martin Clayton’s catalogue…to anyone seeking an insight into Leonardo and his world” Anne Campbell Dixon, The Telegraph.