"This study is an effort to understand why writing and drawing were so important to Leonardo da Vinci, who, over his lifetime, filled about fifteen thousand pages with texts and images.

Although focusing on the fragmentary and chaotic character of Leonardo's notes, Robert Zwijnenberg also examines important cultural developments, such as the renewed interest in classical rhetoric that occurred during the Italian Renaissance, as well as the work of scholars and artists who influenced Leonardo, including Cusanus, Alberti, Taccola, and Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Zwijnenberg's study also sheds new light on linear perspective and anatomy, the artist's most favored fields of study.

Through this synthetic approach, Zwijnenberg demonstrates that Leonardo's obsessive writing and drawing enabled the artist to capture the infinite complexity of the world and that the physical acts of writing and drawing played an independent role in the intellectual process by which Leonardo made sense of the world around him."--BOOK JACKET.