How Leonardo da Vinci become a creative genius? How did he live, love, suffer? With a care for detail & an inspiration worthy of the greatest, the author invites us to enter the intimacy of a man for whom talent, perceived as a godsend, is a true vocation that he takes on with all his soul, refusing the eases of money & of vanities. The genius artist turns himself into a bridge between us & the Creator. In this large & deep novelistic evocation, the Renaissance appears like the quintessence of all periods, the abstract of all passions & the endless mirror of humankinds universe. Freud admired this work, where he discovered the famous Da Vincis child memory–-a vulture coming down to his cradl-–that inspired him one of his essays. Prodigiously lively portrait of the great artist, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci is also a key element of the Russian literature of the 20st century.
Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky was one of the most read & respected authors of his time. Figurehead of the Russian symbolism, sensible to the fight between Christianity & paganism, he became famous after his trilogy Christ & Antichrist was published. His legacy is a rich work that one keeps discovering without tiring.