walter isaacson leonardo da vinci review

There’s no reason we need to know this, says Isaacson. Isaacson ends his book with a “coda” that quotes from Leonardo’s notebooks describing the tongue of a woodpecker.

Throughout, Isaacson invokes two of his previous subjects, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, but declares rightly that the eloquent polymath Leonardo da Vinci was unique and in ways that matter particularly today in our fragmenting world. He was an inquisitive jack of all trades - painter, set designer, engineer - because that's what helped pay the bills.Walter Isaacson begins his chapter on the world’s most famous painting this way: “And now, the Mona Lisa.” We’re near the end of this handsome, hefty, magnificent exploration into the life, work and times of, arguably, the world’s greatest genius. He was left-handed and wrote backwards, less for effect and more simply because it seemed easier. He was gay, enjoying the company of two younger men who eventually split his estate. So here are some of the things we learn about Leonardo the man, as opposed to Leonardo the cliché. While scholars have been writing about Leonardo for the better part of 500 years, Isaacson's bravura lies - like a sculptor freeing a figure from a block of marble - in taking countless volumes of academic tomes and molding them into a 21st-century page-turner. Fabled techies-turned-collectors such as Bill Gates own his prize codexes. Beyond the ubiquitous references to paintings such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, a da Vinci painting of Christ just sold at auction for a record-shattering $450 million.

Leonardo might have been born in the 15th century, but he's never far from pop culture. Isaacson's biographical choice is a shrewd one. Isaacson has tackled Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, and now he's cast his considerable storytelling skills on an Italian renaissance giant with Leonardo da Vinci (Simon & Schuster, 624 pp., ★★★½ out of four). And don't laugh, but the movie rights have already been bought by Leonardo DiCaprio, whose namesake he'll honor by taking the leading role.

Walter isaacson leonardo da vinci review