Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is the central figure of Isaacson’s biography—a Renaissance polymath whose genius spanned art, anatomy, engineering, architecture, geology, optics, and more. Born out of wedlock in Vinci, Italy, Leonardo was denied a formal classical education but cultivated his intellectual powers through observation, experimentation, and relentless curiosity. Isaacson presents Leonardo not as an isolated genius but as a product of his era’s cultural dynamism, shaped by the intersections of art, science, and humanism.

Leonardo’s legacy includes world-famous paintings such as The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, but Isaacson emphasizes that his notebooks—over 7,000 pages of sketches, theories, inventions, and musings—offer an even more profound insight into his mind. These notebooks, messy and unfinished, reveal a man captivated by the patterns of nature, the mechanics of the human body, and the mysteries of light and motion. Leonardo’s genius, Isaacson argues, lay not in divine inspiration but in habits of perception: seeing what others missed, questioning everything, and finding unity across disciplines.

Throughout the biography, Leonardo emerges as both a visionary and a deeply human figure: playful, flawed, distracted, perfectionistic, and sometimes paralyzed by his own imagination.