Leonardo Davinci

“If you follow a route west from the Tuscan city of Florence, you pass through a conurbation that stretches some ninety kilometres to the coast and Pisa.” The opening line from the book starts off the journey a reader would take if he where to find the nearest town of DaVinci’s birthplace, the small town of Vinci, Italy. This book is a biography about Leonardo DaVinci but focuses on his achievements in science opposed to art.

White provides an extensive analysis of Leonardo's notebooks, and argues that DaVinci made important discoveries in the fields of optics and anatomy, particularly the anatomy of the eye, and "worked methodically and with scientific precision centuries ahead of his time in the areas of geology and geography." Only the notebooks' dispersal in pieces across Europe after Leonardo's death kept him from being properly acknowledged as "the first scientist," as White believes. Informative though these sections are, it's the author's multifaceted portrait of DaVinci as a man that really fascinates readers. He was intensely social and charming, gaining the friendship and patronage of many of the great Renaissance princes while enjoying the companionship of beautiful boys. Yet Leonardo could also be distrustful and defensive, frequently expressing a jaundiced view of human nature that may have originated in the stigma of his illegitimate birth and a frightening court trial on charges of sodomy when he was 23. Without indulging in overly reductive psychologizing, White suggests that DaVinci's "almost psychotic need… to unravel the mystery of life" had its roots in personal experiences that taught Leonardo to be wary of his fellow man and to seek his deepest fulfillment in the life of the mind.

White takes on this task to demonstrate that, in addition to his artistic mastery and engineering acumen, Leonardo boasted scientific advances and insights that qualify him as the first scientist. Born more than 100 years before Francis Bacon, a man who, for his work in defining the scientific method, is generally credited with this designation.