Leonardo da Vinci was an artist, scientist, mathematician, engineer, and more. He truly was a Renaissance man. This volume presents the biography of a remarkable man using his own words and works. He devised early airplanes and helicopters more than 300 years before flying machines would be successfully developed. His paintings, sculptures, blueprints, notebooks, and other reminders of his legacy are well represented throughout this book.

Profiles a multifaceted man who made a name for himself in the art world and as a scientist.

For more than thirty years-half his life-he was obsessively devoted to investigating Everything in the natural world. Nothing escaped his interest-how our eyes see, why the sky is blue, what forces build mountains, how light travels, where water comes from, and-most fascinating of all to Leonardo-the inner workings of the human body. Nothing stopped him. It was illegal to dissect human corpses, so he did autopsies in secret, even devising a clever...

Leonardo da Vinci is well known for his inventions as well as his art. But new evidence shows that many of his ideas were realized long before he sketched them out in his notebooks, some even 1700 years before him.

"He was history's most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us? The author of the acclaimed bestsellers Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography. Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo's astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo's genius was based on skills...