It took anatomists until the 1960s, 450 years later, to realize he was correct. And then there’s da Vinci’s remarkable insight into how the heart’s aortic valve works. His ideas about perpetual motion were a precursor to what Newton concluded two centuries later in his First Law of Motion. Throughout his book, Isaacson cites insights, innovations and inventions of da Vinci’s that were often decades, centuries and sometime half-a-millennia ahead of their time. The French Town That Charmed Leonardo da VinciĪfter finishing Isaacson’s, yes, monumental panegyric on Leonardo, I, for one, do not beg to disagree. The Innovators by Walter Isaacson: Review Steve Jobs shunned religion but gave credit to LSD That’s what made him history’s greatest genius.” Leonardo da Vinci is history’s ultimate example of combining art and science. Jobs knew that engineering should be beautiful. In a recent interview in Forbes, Isaacson explains why: “The theme of all my books is that true creativity and innovation comes from being able to stand at the intersection of art and science. Indeed, it was Jobs who planted the seed for the da Vinci book because the great Florentine artist was the Apple founder’s hero and role model. Currently president of the Aspen Institute think tank, one-time chairman of CNN and former editor of Time magazine, he is also the author of critically acclaimed biographies of such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin and Steve Jobs. Monumental is barely adequate to describe journalist Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s greatest Renaissance Man, the 15th century painter and all-round polymath Leonardo da Vinci.īut then Isaacson, himself, is no slouch in the polymath department.

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