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Oct 01, 2019IndyPL_SteveB rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Fascinating, wise, and beautiful biography of Leonardo. It is hard to imagine a better one. Isaacson has spent years traveling the world and reading all of the notebooks of Leonardo to give the fullest portrait of the artist, engineer, anatomist, knowledge seeker, and person that he was. This has revelations about the depth of Leonardo’s genius on every page. A big surprise for me was that Leonardo’s original artistic and engineering inspirations were *theatrical*. His first real job was as a teenage apprentice to the artist Verocchio in Florence. Many of Verocchio’s commissions were for presenting elaborate pageants for the Medici family, and Leonardo joined in enthusiastically. This love of theatrical performance began his experience in painting and engineering and lasted his entire life. Isaacson is convinced that most of Leonardo’s early drawings of flying machines, bird models, and weaponry were actually for theatrical devices used in the various pageants. Isaacson points out that Leonardo’s greatest asset was his insatiable curiosity about the way nature worked. Hydrodynamics, physics, geology, fossils, the anatomy of humans and animals, and the psychology of emotions were all areas he explored and in which he made important discoveries. And of course, there are his few paintings, including what Isaacson calls the two most famous paintings in the world: *The Last Supper* and *The Mona Lisa.* Isaacson goes into great detail about the stories behind the paintings and the way Leonardo’s years of scientific exploration factored into them.