Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto in the 13th century, Vasari traces the development of Italian art across three centuries to the golden epoch of Leonardo and Michelangelo.

From the publisher. Most of what we know about Leonardo da Vinci, we know because of his notebooks. Some 6,000 sheets of notes and drawings survive, perhaps one-fifth of what he actually produced. With an artist's eye and a scientist's curiosity, he recorded in these pages his observations on the movement of water and the formation of rocks, the nature of flight and optics, anatomy, architecture, sculpture, and painting. He jotted down fables, epigrams,...

Drawing on his own unhappy experiences, Goethe's account of Werther's passionate love for Lotte, who is promised to another, is one of the first great Romantic tragic novels. David Constantine's new translation captures the novel's lyric intensity, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes that illuminate Goethe's achievement.

"'The truth which we arrive at by means of mathematical proofs is the same truth that is known to divine wisdom.' Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems, the most brilliant and persuasive defence of the Copernican theory that the Earth goes around the Sun to have been written in the seventeenth century, is one of the foundation texts of modern science. This new translation renders Galileo's lively Italian prose in clear modern English,...