Coinciding with the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Leonardo (1452-1519), Lives of Leonardo da Vinci brings together important early biographies of the polymath by Giorgio Vasari, Paolo Giovio, and anonymous authors. This illustrated volume also features recollections by the humanist scholar Sabba di Castiglione; Matteo Bandello's eyewitness account of the artist creating one of his most famous works, The Last Supper; and letters written by a variety of contemporary authors, including Leonardo himself.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was an Italian painter, architect, writer, and historian, most famous today for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.

Matteo Bandello (1485-1561) was a monk, diplomat, soldier, and writer whose Novelle started a new trend in sixteenth-century narrative literature and had a wide influence in England, France, and Spain. He frequented the courts of Ferrara and Mantua, and was Lucrezia Gonzaga's teacher. The 214 stories in Novelle, published in four volumes between 1554 and 1573, are rich in drama and romance and provide insights into the social intrigues of Renaissance Italy. The stories were sources of themes explored by Shakespeare in "Romeo and Juliet", "Much Ado About Nothing," and "Twelfth Night," as well as John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi."

Paolo Giovio (1483-1552) was an Italian physician, historian, biographer, and prelate. He worked as a physician in Como, but after the plague spread in that city he moved to Rome in 1513 where Pope Leo X assigned him dual chairs in philosophy in the University of Rome. He built a villa on Lake Como, which he called Museo, where he housed his collection of portraits of famous people. In addition to paintings, he collected antiquities, and his collection was one of the first to include objects from the New World. Copies of the paintings from the collection (the Giovio Series) are on display in the Uffizi Gallery. Giovio is chiefly known as the author of several treatises on contemporary history and famous men.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote a series of texts in his notebooks under the general heading "On Painting". The manuscripts were gathered together by Francesco Melzi some time before 1542 and first printed in French and Italian as Trattato della pittura by Raffaelo du Fresne in 1651. The main aim of the treatise was to argue that painting is a science, and in it he made keen observations about how to depict facial expressions and convey moral character in painting.