Becoming Leonardo

BECOMING LEONARDO
An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci
by Mike Lankford
Pub date: March 28, 2017
Hardcover • 320 pages
With more than 40 color illustrations
 ISBN 9781612195957


"One of the most intimate and
clear-sighted portraits we're likely to have of such an elusive artist."

—ROSS KING, author of Brunelleschi's Dome


Why did Leonardo da Vinci leave so many of his major works uncompleted? Why did he carry the Mona Lisa with him everywhere he went for decades, yet never quite finish it? Why did he write backwards? And was he gay?

In Becoming Leonardo (Melville House; March 28, 2017), Mike Lankford explodes every cliché about the Renaissance master and then reconstructs him based on a rich trove of available evidence—bringing to life for the modern reader the man who has been studied by scholars for centuries, yet has remained as mysterious as ever.

"Becoming Leonardo does what historians long to do, and novelists often struggle to achieve . . . A book that has the pace, elegance, and authorial omnipresence of a novel, but which will enlighten, rather than annoy, the astute historian." —NOAH CHARNEY,
author of The Art of Forgery

"One of the most gifted writers it has been my pleasure to read."
—JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON
"Fun and enlightening . . . Lankford's unconventional approach provides for deeper appreciation of a genius."
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"Lankford's jazzy idea of how to tell a strange but perfectly credible story is his alone." —ANN BEATTIE

Mike Lankford is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the author of Life in Double Time: Confessions of an American Drummer, a memoir about his years as a white drummer in a black R&B band. The book was selected by eight major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Austin Chronicle, as the best music book of the year.