Breaking the Da Vinci code | Lisa Jardine
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,,1360654,00.html
“How many hundreds of thousands of words have been written since Vasari, trying to convey the extraordinary combination of talents and imaginative brio which made up the mind of this enigmatic man? While the exquisite drawings, diagrams, maps and engineering blueprints, and the handful of achieved paintings have consistently fascinated all who have seen them, the man himself continues to elude us. Leonardo himself would probably have regarded all those words spent on him as a mistake from the outset. Words are a poor resource for capturing complexity, according to Leonardo.”

Biography Reviews: Leonardo da Vinci … | Lucy Hughes-Hallett
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1285750,00.html
“Nicholl, who lives in Italy, conjures up in meticulous detail the physical reality of Renaissance Florence and Milan. He re-creates the din and flurry of building works that characterise Florence in its expansionist prime. He itemises the minerals used in paint manufacture and deduces from the widespread use of egg white in tempera that artists? studios must have been full of hens.”

A Work in Progress | Melinda Henneberge
http://www.artnewsonline.com/currentarticle.cfm?art_id=1240
“David Alan Brown, the longtime curator of Italian Renaissance painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., says he has lost patience with new theories that are not rooted in the visual record. Of the Mona Lisa, for instance, he notes that ‘everything has been said about that painting’?that it is a self-portrait, a mistress portrait, a male lover, a woman who had breast cancer or who was bereaved or pregnant or both. ‘I was amused by these things in the beginning,’ Brown says. ‘But now I find them tedious.'”

Introduction to Leonardo and His Drawings | Carmen C. Bambach
http://tinyurl.com/7tlxn
From the Met show, January 2003

Old master’s mother was a slave, reveal Da Vinci researchers | Burhan Wazir
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,810926,00.html
“Vezzosi said Caterina’s Middle Eastern heritage was a primary influence on Leonardo’s work as an artist, mathematician and philosopher. ‘There is some evidence that in his later years Da Vinci was increasingly becoming interested in the Middle East,’ said Vezzosi.”Article Date: 13 October 2002