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Leonardo's Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World

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German science writer Stefan Klein has written a dandy retrospective on the work of Leonardo da Vinci and his envisioning of a future of spectacular technology, much of which has come to pass some 500 years after he lived. Leonardo da Vinci, of course, is best known for his spectacular Renaissance art, and anyone who has seen his stunning "Mona Lisa" and the "Last Supper of Christ" will attest to his genius in this realm. But he was also a designer, an engineer, and a builder of fascinating machines. And many of those that he could not actually build; he still anticipated and helped to further their creation.

At least that is the story told in this fine synopsis, "Leonardo's Legacy: How da Vinci Reimagined the World." Klein pursues discussion of many different elements of da Vinci's legacy, taking a decidedly thematic rather than chronological approach in doing so. As a result he has chapters on his curiosity, his interest in water and perhaps even fluid dynamics, his development of fortifications and fantastic weapons of war, his quest to fly, his building of automatons and envisioning of robots, his interest in the body and human anatomy, his apocalyptic and other musings. All of these items are interesting and worthy of study. They do not, however, make a biography and anyone seeking such a study would do well to look elsewhere. But if a brisk overview of de Vinci's life and work is desired this is as good a work as any on this subject.

While the genius of Leonardo da Vinci is secure I was struck by how ineffective many of his ideas proved to be. He promised, for example, to build a giant crossbow that could assault fortifications. He never tested such a weapon, at least as far as we know and when modern engineers tried to replicate his design the weapon was useless. The same could be said of his studies of flight, which never worked as he had envisioned. That is not to say his conceptions had no viability, but his knowledge was insufficient to allow success. I have the impression some of his ideas were brainstorms and little more, and that he was able in several of them to find nobles to invest in them. Was he scamming them, or were they legitimate attempts to advance knowledge and capability?

Regardless, this is an interesting, journalistic account of the more well-known of da Vinci's activities. Read as such it is quite satisfying. Those well versed in da Vinci's career already will, however, find little here that is not covered, often more extensively, in other books about his life and career.

Leonardo da Vinci was many things, but in this fine biography, Stefan Klein focuses on Leonardo the naturalist. He explores how Leonardo could see the world with a new and hitherto unique vision. Klein analyzes how a painter could have invented the "exploded view" of bodies and machines, in which a translucent outer structure revealed inner connections. We are so used to seeing bodies and machines deconstructed in this way -- by drawings or overlays or no by small slices created by MRI machines or personal computers -- that we forget that the "exploded view" was a human invention of great illustrative power.

Klein interviews hobbyists and scholars who build Leonardo's flying machines, and he visits the places where Leonardo might have conducted test flights. Klein consults engineers about details of Leonard's water clock. He hikes the terrain that Leonardo explored. On a personal side, he visits the Loire Valley and a house where Leonardo spent his last days; the house has a marvelous collection of model machines based on Leonardo's drawings and description. I spent several hours marvelling over those same models, and similar models in an IBM exhibit in New York City.

"His notebooks are full of reflections inspired by details other people would likely deem insignificant and ignore," Klein writes. His details were astonishing for the time -- water currents invisible to most viewers and dissected bodies in exquisite detail. Klein writes that Leonardo was "driven by curiosity,he worked for the sheer pleasure of understanding the world."

The illustrations in the Kindle version of this biography are perfectly acceptable for understanding the text, particularly since many of the images have become icons in the Western world. But, I did find that they showed better on the Kindle for PC than on the Kindle itself. The reddish brown inks somehow made the images come alive in all their detail.

Robert C. Ross 2010