Publisher's description:
This unprecedented editorial project began in 1964.
That year, after a careful and rigorous evaluation by the academic community, a decree by the President of the Italian Republic awarded the management and facsimile reproduction of all the works by Leonardo da Vinci to the Florentine publisher, Giunti.
For the first and only time, the owners of the works by Leonardo throughout the world gave their consent to directly access the originals for this official reproduction.
State-of-the-art techniques combined with extraordinary workmanship made it possible to reproduce faithfully and reunite the originals in the only facsimile edition in the world.
The amazing, monumental collection entitled National Edition of the Manuscripts and Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci presented here in came about in this manner.
Only 998 copies of each facsimile work, hand numbered from 1/998 to 998/998, are available worldwide. Each facsimile is accompanied by a Certificate of Guarantee attesting to its originality and unique character, along with a signed Notarised Certificate.
Over the years facsimiles have been acquired by public and private, national and international collections and, like the originals, they have been jealously guarded, to such an extent that today only a few exemplars are still available.
This collection of drawings, variously executed in ink, chalk, and silverpoint, bears witness to Leonardo's passion surrounding the phenomena of nature. Flowers, plants and the movement of water are depicted with scientific precision: plants are shown in relation to the terrain where they grow, water is portrayed in all its headlong, destructive fury as part of an overall vision of atmospheric activity and turbulence, and mountains are studied from a geological viewpoint. Just as in the series of drawings on Horses and Other Animals, these studies make up part of the Royal Collection at Windsor, which is also comprised of the Anatomical Drawings and the drawings for The Last Supper. For the first time, Leonardo's nature studies are presented in their entirety, accompanied by a catalogue by Carlo Pedretti and an introduction by Kenneth Clark. All the studies are arranged in chronological order and subdivided into ten categories consisting of a 'topic sheet' containing the elements of all the four classifications of Leonardo's drawings at Windsor, early studies, narrative landscapes, mountains drawn in charcoal, plant studies for Leda and the Swan, school drawings, the red series (from the red ground on the paper used for the sanguine drawings), water studies, the Adda River series and symbolic landscapes and floods.