Da vinci biography review

Leonardo da Vinci
by Walter Isaacson
600 pages
Simon & Schuster
Published: October 2017

“Leonardo da Vinci” is Walter Isaacson’s best-selling 2017 biography of the 15th century’s preeminent polymath and quintessential “Renaissance Man.” Isaacson is an author, journalist and professor at Tulane University who has also written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Henry Kissinger.

Leonardo may be best known for painting the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper but his interests were wide-ranging: from anatomy and architecture to fluid mechanics, geometry and music.

In addition to his paintings, more than 7,000 pages of his notebooks survive – filled with a remarkable assortment of drawings, sketches, notes, doodles and calculations. These provide the prospective biographer (or enthusiastic scholar) with with enough food for thought to last a lifetime.

Isaacson does a commend