Button Books £9.99
ISBN-13: 9781787081123
Like others in this series such as David Attenborough and Muhammad Ali it mirrors the Button Books approach pioneered by their Factology series. Here in a slimmer volume format we see graphics to the fore which are melded to facts. Even the front cover follows this format with bullet points such as writes backwards (of course written in reverse text) and details such as 44,000 drawings.
Inside there are timelines to show Leonardo’s place in history along with details on his greatest works. It does tell us how he painted on a dry wall for the Last Supper rather than on wet plaster but doesn’t tell us why a great genius should have known how long his painting would last using that method. The Mona Lisa gets a two page spread and somewhat confidently attributes the name of the sitter, a subject hotly debated for centuries.
There is a nice comparison between Leonardo and Michelangelo and surprisingly quite a bit of space given to his vegetarianism. His famous designs for machines are also ceovered and some have even been made in recent years and proven to be quite effective.
As mentioned above this is slimmer than the factology series and is best served as a primer to more in depth exploration but as introduction to a great thinker and artist it works beautifully.