Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson, 2017

Leonardo da Vinci Review

About

Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci (2017) is a lush, insightful exploration of history’s most creative mind. Drawing on thousands of pages of Leonardo’s notebooks, Isaacson shows the man as both artist and scientist—a restless thinker whose curiosity knew no boundaries. It’s less a conventional biography than a celebration of human imagination itself.

Overview

Isaacson dismantles the myth of Leonardo as a singular genius and rebuilds him as a profoundly human one—self-taught, distracted, endlessly experimental. The narrative moves from his illegitimate birth in Vinci to his years in Florence, Milan, and France, tracing both masterpieces and unfinished projects. Leonardo’s sketches, dissections, and mechanical designs become extensions of his art; for him, science and beauty were one pursuit.

Summary

(light spoilers) The biography weaves together Leonardo’s artistic breakthroughs—The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, and countless sketches—with his obsession for anatomy, flight, and geometry. Isaacson reveals how Leonardo’s curiosity, not discipline, drove his greatness: his failure to finish works was the price of endless wonder. The book’s final chapters capture his later years in France under Francis I, reflecting on mortality and legacy. In the end, Leonardo appears not as mythic perfection but as proof that creativity thrives on imperfection—a mind forever in motion.

Key Themes / Main Ideas

• Curiosity as genius — questions more powerful than answers.
• Art and science — observation as universal language.
• Imperfection — unfinished work as sign of living mind.
• Interconnection — beauty in how things relate.
• Humanism — wonder as the highest intelligence.

Strengths and Weaknesses

• Strengths — Richly detailed, elegantly written, deeply inspiring.
• Strengths — Makes Renaissance history feel alive and relevant.
• Weaknesses — Overlaps with Isaacson’s familiar structure of genius; repetition in themes.
• Weaknesses — Heavy art description may lose some readers, but rewards patience.

Reviewed with focus on themes, audience, and takeaways — Walter Isaacson