“More than any other artist, Leonardo has a cult following. He is not merely a figure of prodigal creativity, he is a source of myths, legends, untruths, half-truths and baffling conspiracies, the inspiration for an ocean of pseudo-science and mumbo-jumbo. Yet strangely, for most of history, Leonardo was best known not as a helicopter pioneer, a cross-dresser, a specialist in military fortifications or a painter with a nice facility at sultry, androgynous portraits, but as the author of The Treatise on Painting, an attempt to make art systematic, even scientific.”