Leonardo da Vinci lived an itinerant life. Throughout his career - from its beginnings in the creative maelstrom of fifteenth-century Florence to his role as genius in residence at the court of the king of France - Leonardo created a kind of private universe for himself and his work. Leonardo also spent a great deal of time away from his easel, pursuing his interest in engineering, natural science, sculpture, poetry, fables, music and anatomy. In the time that another artist would finish a series of paintings, he would work on one. Sometimes a painting would take decades, accompanying him on his travels as he worked on other commissions. Leonardo's private world was both vibrant and active. It sometimes did and at other times did not interact with the wider world. But what emerged from it has established Leonardo as the definition of the Renaissance Man.

Antoni Gaudi has a reputation as monastic, mad and hermetic. But the architect of many of the buildings that define Barcelona's cityscape was no mad eccentric. He was a genius inspired by his faith in nature and the divine. Picking up the same strands of eclecticism and art nouveau current in fin de siecle European architecture, he transformed them into an idiom unique to himself and Barcelona to create a series of buildings as revolutionary in their engineering as they were astonishing for their spaces. For Gaudi his work was his life, and this book reveals the exuberant world and groundbreaking work of this unique figure in the history of modern architecture.