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Leonardo da Vinciwas the definition of “Renaissance Man” and, as Stefan Klein maintains, thescope of his accomplishments is too wide for the academic pigeonholes of ourage. In Leonardo’s Legacy, the Germanscience writer shows that the painter of TheLast Supper and the engineer of water-driven mills “regarded art,technology, and science, which we now consider such dissimilar endeavors, as asingle pursuit of the human mind.” Impatient with theorizing, Da Vinciconcentrated on facts and practical applications. As for the puzzle of how theartist/scientist could care for all living things and yet design elaborateweapons for his brutal patrons, Klein writes that many of those devices seemnot to have worked. Perhaps as has been suggested about German physicist WernerHeisenberg, who failed to develop the atom bomb for the Nazis, Da Vinci “had nointention of supplying serviceable weapons.”
