This book presents a compact and pleasurable overview of the Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), attending to his painting, social milieu, and scientific pursuits. Quiviger sketches out Leonardo as a person as very much a part of the communities he inhabited, an individual possessed of considerable skills in his capacity as a courtier, and one with a mind very much oriented to nature as a site for persistent intellectual inquiry. In this way, Leonardo is as embedded in his varied social spheres as he is an attentive observer of the natural world; he used his fullest abilities to negotiate prestigious appointments and undertake work interesting to him.

This story is told, in part, as the singular life trajectory of a country boy who rises to dizzying heights, ending his career in the employ of Francis I, the king of France. These events amount to what midway through the book is referred to as the remarkable social ascension of the artist (109). This arc is not without its misfortunes, including the famously abandoned project of the Adoration of the Magi and the deterioration of the Last Supper, among others. Indeed, it is against the background of these unsatisfactory commissions that Quiviger sees the lack of major artistic commissions for the artist in his last decade. While Raphael and Michelangelo were fulfilling some of their most significant commissions at the Vatican, Leonardo was left without a patron in Rome. Painting is understood to be the primary means for the artist's engagement with all things—his core discipline, which allowed him to research and represent nature. Leonardo's didactic writings on how to paint are mined for how they instruct the development of the mind as well as the hand. The book offers a sense of how Leonardo produced his paintings, primarily through description of the artist's workshop practice, such as how he produced cartoons that were worked up as paintings by his assistants, which were then touched up by the master himself. Such a procedure is described in the production of the Salvator Mundi.

Well-placed insertions orient the reader to how our own contemporary mores clash with Leonardo's. For example, Quiviger interprets the never completed Battle of Anghiari commission against the backdrop of the artist's recent stint as an engineer in the employ of the warlord Cesare Borgia. The vortex of action coalescing in the scene of the Fight for the Standard is a triumph in the genre of battle painting, not representative of early modern warfare's manifestations through the deployment of ballistic artillery. While exposing this duality, the author simultaneously acknowledges the inherent oddity for today's viewer to understand the rich and complicated imagery of the art of war.

The book also functions as a serviceable primer on Renaissance culture. For example, included among observations on Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci is a discussion of Platonic love and social constraints on the lives of women. A discussion of Leonardo's early commissions, such as the Adoration of the Magi and Saint Jerome, are followed by the artist's own critical remarks about the cultic veneration of images. The religious wars of the early sixteenth century are made vivid through mention of how the artist, even if only in his private writings, voiced criticisms most famously articulated by Martin Luther in the early years of the Reformation.

The notes are spare and the bibliography tightly edited. This book is most suitable to those interested in a digestible overview of the artist that deftly draws together analysis of his major artistic projects while signaling at the myriad sources and preoccupations that so drove Leonardo's restless mind.