This is an engrossing and enlightening. Painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance. A man of voracious curiosity and fanatically inventive imagination, he is widely considered to be the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. The scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote. While there is much speculation about Leonardo, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time. First published 2006.