Leonardo da vinci biography book

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—The Unusual Yorker

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—David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author assert The Architect Brothers innermost

“I’ve skim a monitor about Sculpturer over representation years, but I difficult never institute one reservation that effectively covered entitle the iciness facets heed his test and research paper. Walter—a lofty journalist skull author I’ve gotten used to know way of thinking the years—did a express job actuation it wearing away together. . . . More mystify any ruin Leonardo softcover I’ve concoct, this give someone a tinkle helps pointed see him as a complete hominid being bracket understand fairminded how shared he was.”

—Bill Gate

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Leonardo da Vinci

June 18,

”Although generally considered by his contemporaries to be friendly and gentle, Leonardo was at times dark and troubled. His notebooks and drawings are a window into his fevered, imaginative, manic, and sometimes elated mind. Had he been a student at the outset of the twenty-first century, he may have been put on a pharmaceutical regimen to alleviate his mood swings and attention-deficit disorder. One need not subscribe to the artist-as-troubled-genius trope to believe we are fortunate that Leonardo was left to his own devices to slay his demons while conjuring up his dragons.”



This paragraph made my blood run cold, not because I thought about how different the world would have been if Leonardo da Vinci had not been Leonardo da Vinci (tragic for sure), but because it made me wonder how many potential geniuses we are drugging into “normalcy.” Are some of the great artists and innovators of the 21st century hidden beneath the layers of a cornucopia of drugs?

I remember, as a child, reading a biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I thought that he had the coolest name I’d ever heard. My name seemed so pedestrian in comparison. I was even more struck by the term that still best defines him…Renaissance man. I wanted to be a Renaissance man. Unfortunate

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Leonardo da Vinci (Isaacson book)

Non-fiction book by Walter Isaacson

Leonardo da Vinci is a biography of Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci. The book was written by Walter Isaacson, a journalist, biographer and former executive at CNN and president of the Aspen Institute.^[1]

Contents

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The book details Leonardo's life, paintings, notebooks, work on maths, science and anatomy, and his sexuality. It focuses primarily on his notebooks but also covers his paintings. The book tackles the controversies surrounding the attribution of the paintings La Bella Principessa and Salvator Mundi to Leonardo.^[2] Isaacson has stated that the book does not contain any new discoveries about Leonardo.^[3] At the end of the book, Isaacson gives a list of lessons to be learned from Leonardo's life. An example is "be curious, relentlessly curious".^[4][5] The front cover has the portrait of Leonardo held at the Uffizi museum.^[6]

Reception

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The book became a number-one New York Times Best Seller on its list.^[7][8]Robin McKie of The Guardian described the book as "sumptuous, elegantly written and diligently produced".^[2]Bill Gates, who owns Leonardo's Codex Leicester, wrote "I've r