Even at just under 600 pages, it’s a masterpiece of concision considering the far-flung terrain he travels. One of the marvels of Isaacson’s expansive tale is that it feels compact. But the book doesn’t need a handy set of lists. The book concludes with a section titled “Learning From Leonardo” that veers a little too much into Buzzfeed listicle territory, almost as if there for just that reason. In a recent New Yorker essay on Freud, Louis Menand notes, “People write biographies because they hope that lives have lessons.” Isaacson very much agrees, sometimes too much. But he is a man who also feels very much of our time: a gay, left-handed, vegetarian, dandy bastard. Isaacson does present a Leonardo who is the very prototype of the Renaissance man excelling in the arts of painting, architecture and sculpture, as well as anatomy, geology, weapon design, hydrology and much more. Via painstaking thoroughness with primary and secondary sources, consulting experts in myriad fields, and firsthand accounts of visiting paintings, churches and towns, Isaacson deftly reveals an intimate Leonardo well beyond the tired trope of the Great Man of some remote golden age who shall ne’er come our way again.
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