![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Had he not painted, or had his paintings been lost, the now-famous notebooks he kept of his studies, ideas, and inventions would probably have been confined to the footnotes of scholarly specialists.Īgainst this, Isaacson enthuses over Leonardo’s multi-faceted brilliance, which he ascribes to his ability to see a profound puzzle behind what the vast majority of people take for granted-the blueness of the sky, for example. It is true that Leonardo discovered no law of physics, no anatomical feature is named for him, and his only foray into large-scale engineering works (an attempt to divert the River Arno from Pisa to reduce that city’s independence from Florence) ended in disaster. Does Walter Isaacson’s handsomely produced and well-written biography of Leonardo da Vinci (which only occasionally descends to the demotic, such as calling Michelangelo a “hot new artist”) tell us enough that is new to distinguish it from previous efforts? Although it bears a strong resemblance to Charles Nicholl’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind (2004), using many of the same sources and the same quotations, Isaacson’s book emphasizes Leonardo’s scientific and technological endeavours while Nicholl’s downplays them. ![]()
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