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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Details are compelling in a long book that defies skimming.
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Outstanding
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Christian Science Monitor Christopher Andreae
Enthralling, immensely detailed... [Nicholl] cuts through much of the scholarly debate that today sometimes threatens to smother any cogent view of certain Leonardo issues.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review David Gelernter
Charles Nicholl's 'Leonardo da Vinci isn't merely a lovely book; it's Leonardesque. Leonardo knew how to make drawings and paintings glow with lyrical mystery. At its best, Nicholl's book glows too.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Jasper Rees
This gripping, beautifully designed biography is scholarship at its most accessible, and demotic.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Alexander Nagel
Nicholl's book is pure biography, filled with carefully researched and sometimes little-known facts, masterfully woven together.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Frances Spalding
A humane understanding plays through his lively, fluent prose. It occasionally leads him to make suppositions that do not always convince, in part owing to the sparsity of facts. But, overall, this biography is a hugely impressive feat of historical and imaginative empathy.
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Outstanding
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The New Yorker Adam Gopnik
His life of Leonardo is fresh, detailed, vivid, and presents perhaps the most fully human Leonardo we have; the book is filled with fine brief accessory lives and neat, two-paragraph evocations of complicated bits of social history.
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Outstanding
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Houston Chronicle Lisa Jennifer Selzman
But it is in the consideration of da Vinci's creative processes that this history is most riveting.
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] David Franklin
Clearly structured and detailed, and is, in the end, more valuable as a panoramic social history of Leonardo's Europe than as a monograph. It is an approachable, safe introduction to the artist for the general reader and the student alike.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Lisa Jardine
Nicholl is always careful to warn us if he is adducing evidence from beyond his subject's own life, or risking a guess or a flash of purely personal insight into his much-researched hero's personality.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Martin Gayford
A very readable and reliable narrative in which only very occasionally does one feel the author is giving his imagination too much freedom.
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
Da Vinci's polymathic pursuits, as well as his own translations from the artist's numerous notebooks, are some of this dense but readable volume's most compelling aspects.
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Favorable
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Booklist Donna Seaman
Nicholl takes a marvelously fresh and human approach to the fascinating life of Leonardo. [1 Nov 2004, p.461]
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Mixed
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The Economist
Gratifying to read, yet it ties itself in knots trying to follow every lead that Leonardo, his contemporaries and a legion of scholars have left behind... Such information would be more enlightening if it informed an analysis of how Leonardo became the great creative thinker we now consider him to be.
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Mixed
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The Spectator David Ekserdjian
When it comes to the art, Nicholl is as a rule pretty reliable, but it is clear that in the main he is paraphrasing received opinion rather than making up his own mind. He has obviously looked at Leonardo’s own works carefully, but he does not know nearly as much about Renaissance art more generally, and irritating little errors creep in.
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Unfavorable
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Los Angeles Times A. Richard Turner
The reader is smothered by inconsequential detail, making any intellectual focus or thematic structure hard to discern. His discussion of Leonardo's science lacks a wider context, and he seems uncomfortable treating Leonardo's works of art in terms other than their subject matter.
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Unfavorable
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The Independent Charles Darwent
Nicholl has written two distinct and unsatisfying books here: one that picks over a skeletal past, another that tries to ground that past in the present... Its subject as unknowable as he's ever been.
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