(Consider the legions who have tackled Shakespeare.) Isaacson does not seem to be that kind of writer. (Among the most staggering: He intuited the first and third laws of motion, 200 years ahead of Newton.)īut what Leonardo’s notebooks lack - which Isaacson readily concedes - are “intimate personal revelations.” Some biographers are perfectly comfortable composing a full-body portrait based solely on a few faint footprints. There are, famously, 7,200 pages of his glorious notebooks to work from, and yes, they are rich in maps, doodles, anatomical drawings, schema for new machines, models for new weapons, proposals for city redesigns, geometric patterns, portraits, eddies, swirls, curls, pensées, scientific observations of uncanny prescience. His other geniuses left behind bountiful source material about the lives they led. There is a significant difference, though, between “Leonardo da Vinci” and Isaacson’s previous biographies. Like the other idols in Isaacson’s gallery of polymaths and visionaries - Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs - Leonardo da Vinci was born with extra bundles of receptors, attuned to frequencies his peers could not hear and capable of making connections no one else could see, especially between the sciences and the humanities. Because Walter Isaacson has made a cottage industry of writing about Renaissance men, it’s no surprise, really, that he’s finally landed on a subject from the actual Renaissance.