Book One · A Novel

The Borrowed Eye

A Novel of Leonardo da Vinci

Fabián de la Fuente

Florence, 1473. A young painter buys a piece of rock crystal — and starts dreaming of things the world won’t see for centuries.

Spanish edition. The full book is here to read and download in its original Spanish. English translation coming later.

Download PDF Spanish · 94 MB

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The book

The Borrowed Eye is a historical mystery about Leonardo da Vinci. Through a small piece of rock crystal, Leonardo begins to dream in fragments of a future he can’t make sense of. He sees people flying, drifting down from the sky, breathing underwater, talking to someone who isn’t there. Everything he sees exists today. All he can do is try to draw it with the skills of his own time.

Meanwhile, a messenger carrying one of his letters turns up dead by the Arno, and a crimson-dyed thread starts to surface in workshops, contracts and account books. A fair-play mystery with every clue in plain sight, an impossible love with Lisa Gherardini, and Leonardo’s art and inventions told through his craft, his anatomy and sheer stubbornness — never through magic.

1473–1519from Florence to France
32chapters
200+color illustrations
1rock crystal

“…mine is a borrowed ey…”

Damaged codex · Chapter 1

The story

Forty-six years
seeing through other eyes

A dream can light up an invention or a fear — never the name of the culprit. Each place pushes him on to the next.

  1. 1473 – 1482

    Florence

    Verrocchio’s workshop, the angel in the Baptism and the first crystal. An anonymous accusation, a letter to the Duke of Milan and a messenger who never arrives.

  2. 1482 – 1499

    Milan

    The court of Ludovico Sforza: flying machines and war machines, Cecilia Gallerani, the Vitruvian Man and the Last Supper.

  3. 1500 – 1508

    The road

    Venice, Cesare Borgia, the Battle of Anghiari and his first meeting with Lisa Gherardini.

  4. 1508 – 1519

    What remains

    Rome, Amboise and the end of the road: the portrait he never hands over, the notebooks and one last look.

Inside the book

A notebook that reads
like a novel

The novel is presented as the reconstruction of one of Leonardo’s lost notebooks. Every page gives you something to look at.

Color plate: study of curly-haired angels
Plates Color notebook drawings with hand-lettered captions.
Plate: study of rock crystals from several angles
The crystal The book’s one touch of the fantastic. It lends Leonardo images — never the know-how.
Plate: Leonardo’s aerial screw with a man looking up at it
The inventions The aerial screw and other machines, explained with the craft of their time.
Pop-art interlude: the Mona Lisa in flat colors
Interludes Between chapters, one of Leonardo’s works reimagined as full-page pop art.

  • Margin notes

    Handwritten in blue ink, right next to the paragraph they comment on.

    “Is there a crystal inside the eye? Ask the fishmonger.”

  • Mirror writing

    Some words are written backwards, the way Leonardo wrote. Hold them up to a mirror.

  • Damaged codex

    Stains and torn corners hide part of the page: only what survives is copied.

  • Dreams

    Set in italics, indented on both sides.

    “He dreamed he was flying.”

Read the book

Page by page,
like a real book

Open it right here in a reader that turns the pages one at a time, or download the PDF and read it anywhere. The book is written in Spanish.

Read it here

Turn the pages with a swipe, your mouse or the arrow keys.

Download PDF

Full-color digital edition of Book One: 564 pages in Spanish, 94 MB PDF.

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Download Spanish · 94 MB

Spanish edition. The reader and the PDF are the original Spanish text of Book One (564 pages); an English translation isn’t available yet.

The author

Fabián de la Fuente

Lives in Vancouver. He first imagined The Borrowed Eye thirty-five years ago. He directed every chapter and every illustration in the book, and used artificial intelligence the way you’d use a workshop: to try, discard and try again, under a single eye.

“What you’re holding is neither a shortcut nor an experiment. It’s the object I couldn’t commission back then — and that now, at last, can sit on a table.”

From the author’s note (translated)

The Borrowed Eye · Book One
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