For some reason, this book just didn't hold my interest like I thought it would. (It's telling that I stopped reading at certain points so that I could start and finish other books.) I was also bugged by the sweeping story-telling that seemed to have less in the way of supporting source material. The story about da Vinci dying in the arms of Francis I, for example -- which is told in the Epilogue -- is an apocryphal (and almost certainly fictional) story lifted whole-cloth from Vasari.