When you think of the greatest painter in Western history, your mind automatically goes to one man: Leonardo da Vinci. Yet, this defining genius left behind fewer than 25 attributed major works, and on his deathbed, he supposedly wept, claiming he had offended God and men by failing to practice his art as he should have done. Underneath the pristine marble statue mythology lies the human story of a brilliant, easily distracted, self-taught outsider who left a trail of abandoned masterpieces and 13,000 pages of secretive notes across Italy. Legally barred from respectable professions in Florence due to his birth out of wedlock in 1452, Leonardo was spared from the rigid, dogmatic academic brainwashing of the 1400s. Instead, he was forced to learn entirely through his own raw observation of nature, developing a manic, unquenchable curiosity that dr ...