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, arranged and presented by Carlo Pedretti and catalogued by Patricia Trutty-Coohill, is particularly important due to the quantity of heretofore unpublished material, including the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library containing the complete series of 104 caricatures copied in the sixteenth century directly from Leonardo's original drawings on physiognomic research, for the most part no longer extant.
Also in this edition are the 8 figure studies in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, including the first drawing for the Virgin of the Rocks and the preparatory drawing for the Virgin's head in the Louvre's Virgin and Child with St Anne. Recently acquired, and presented for the first time in facsimile, are the two famous drapery studies and the sheet of figure studies now at the Getty Museum in Malibu.
Drawings by Leonardo's pupils and followers are gathered in the remaining facsimiles for a total of about 200 drawings.
The volume of text is in English and includes extensive concordance tables, the history of the collections, indexes and a full bibliography – a work of impeccable scholarship presented in a splendid typographic layout.