Peter Conrad’s best art books of 2017

A quest for the real Leonardo da Vinci, a memorial to Leonora Carrington and the art in Proust fascinate and illuminateThe definite article in the subtitle of Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography (Simon & Schuster £25.50) says it all – but why should the bestselling biographer of Benjamin Franklin, Einstein and Steve Jobs pretend to false modesty? Isaacson is uniquely well-equipped to write the definitive account of a universal man who was a painter and a musi