The Smartest Person Who Ever LivedBy Bob Gelms In my “it does not count” opinion, the smartest person who ever lived was, unquestionably, Sir Isaac Newton. An awful lot of people disagree with me. The preponderance of their opinions puts Leonardo da Vinci in the number one spot. For the purposes of this issue we will confine our investigation to da Vinci as number one. Mostly because America’s number one biographer, Walter Isaacson, has just published Leonardo, the best biography I have ever read on Leonardo da Vinci. When I was in 4th grade in St. Thomas Moore grade school on the south side of Chicago, we had a series of biographies written for grade school kids. Most of the series was taken up with the saints. They had, however, a few biographies of famous people in history. The bookcase that housed this series was right next to my desk. One day, as was usual, I was bored so I reached over and pulled out the book on da Vinci. It didn't take long before I was hooked. The term “Renaissance Man” was new so I asked the kindly, ever so patient, Dominican nun who was only interested in the welfare and intellectual growth of her students. (sarcasm) She pronounced it for me and told me what it meant. Up to that point in my life it, for sure, was the coolest thing I had ever heard. From that point on I was fixated on Leonardo da Vinci. There were a lot of surprises in store for me because the biography I read in that Catholic grammar school of course didn’t mention that da Vinci was vegetarian, gay, illegitimate, left-handed, a heretic who produced some of the finest religious paintings in history and the world’s leading procrastinator. When I heard that Walter Isaccson was publishing a new biography, Leonardo, my first thought was, “Does the world really need ANOTHER biography of Leonardo da Vinci? After all there are only about 32,000 of them!” My second thought was that if there was any writer who could bring something fresh, exciting, and surprising to the subject of da Vinci's life, it was, without a doubt, Walter Isaccson. Mr. Isaccson does not shy away from difficult subjects. He has written about Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin. His biography of Leonardo da Vinci is dazzling. In Leonardo, Mr. Isaccson gives us a superb scrutiny of of the master's paintings. It is to our everlasting benefit that the author seems to possess an extraordinarily discerning eye for these works in addition to an erudite mind capable of critical analysis. This brings a whole new aspect to the career of Leonardo da Vinci. According to Mr. Isaccson, da Vinci looked at the world around him and saw that everything was related to everything else, something of a theme during the High Renaissance. Da Vinci, however, took it to regions unknown. For example, he didn’t see that there was much of a difference between science and art or between art and the study of nature. All you need to get an idea of the relationship between art and science is to take a look at his breathtaking rendition of Vitruvian Man. The sensitive viewer will see a spectacular work of art but also the ideal of human proportions and geometry. Sfumato is a painting technique invented by da Vinci to give depth to the edges of his subjects. It gives a sense of three dimensions. Coupled with the glazes he used, he got that smoky hazy feeling that seems to pervade his paintings. Mr. Isaccson points out that da Vinci got this effect by carefully smearing the paint. It has been thoroughly documented that on a few of his works, Leonardo da Vinci inadvertently left his fingerprints, which have been used to confirm that he painted a few that weren’t, at first, attributed to him. This book is filled with little gems like that. The amount of detail Mr. Isaccson provides is prodigious. Buy Leonardo, if for no other reason than to read the chapters on the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. They are just riveting and well worth the price of admission. I can’t fit all of da Vinci's interests in this review but the eminent art historian Kenneth Clark’s comment on Leonardo da Vinci seems to encapsulate his whole personality. Clark called him, “the most relentlessly curious man in history.”