From Publishers Weekly
Say what one will about Edna O'Brien's ravishing clip job of Joyce, Peter Gay's moderate Mozart or Edmund White's microcosmic Proust, the editors at Penguin Lives have a knack for matching up free-thinking meditators and their subjects. A surgeon and a writer about medicine, Nuland (How We Die) uses much of his brief bookAlimited in size and scope to the series's quick-take, authorially inflected formatAto explain the prodigal da Vinci as pioneering anatomist. The first 11 pages detail Nuland's personal obsession with da Vinci; the later pages describe da Vinci's concern with human and animal anatomy, and review the bibliographical jumble of his surviving notebooks and papers. Nuland's da Vinci is tireless, perhaps sublimated, in his intellectual and artistic activity, finishing few canvases (one the Mona Lisa, another The Last Supper) and almost nothing else during a long life largely financed, sometimes erratically, by patrons who indirectly supported an expensive retinue of friends, assistants and servants. He emerges as a compulsive investigatorAof geometry, optics, hydraulics, architecture, sculpture, painting, botany, biology, military mechanics and the flight of birdsAmoving from city-state to city-state in Italy, encountering ruler after ruler who sought to harness his gifts. Yet perhaps unforgivably, given the series's promise of New Yorker profile-like effervescence, da Vinci as personality slips away; what we get is a clean condensation of the facts. Only the final chapter, "Matters of the Heart and Other Matters," injects some of Leonardo's own fervor, in an in-depth look at one of his abiding obsessions, the structure and function of the human heart. Nuland's account is solid, but lacks enough of the flourish that its subject so effortlessly achieved and, that, on a much smaller scale, the Lives series seems to strive for. 4 illus. BOMC, QPB, History Book Club selections. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Scientific American
Artist, anatomist, architect, mathematician, military engineer-few have been as protean as Leonardo. Sir Kenneth Clark called him "the most relentlessly curious man in history." To Nuland, "he is also the historical figure about whom we are most relentlessly curious." In this brief life, Nuland summarizes Leonardo's achievements skillfully. Being a physician (clinical professor of surgery at Yale University), he is particularly interested in Leonardo's pioneering anatomical dissections and drawings. But to him as to other biographers, Leonardo remains essentially elusive. As the English critic Walter Pater said, "he seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice, silent for other men."

EDITORS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN


From AudioFile
As opposed to the traditional chronological biography, this loosely organized treatise examines both what is and what is not known about the great master. Scott Brick's comfortable voice sounds genuinely interested as it guides us though the evidence from which we must surmise how the gifted thinker solved nature's riddles and created monumental art. The narration becomes noticeably tumescent when describing Da Vinci's dissections of penile blood supply. Unfortunately, Brick's tendency to vary his voice from loud to very soft sometimes results in the loss of important words. And Nuland's antiquated Freudian ideas about homosexuality should have died with the great Viennese shrink. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Leonardo has profited from the notion that he was a peerless genius and suffered from a reputation for never completing his undertakings. The bad rap against him is borne out by the lack of his finished masterpieces in all the kinds of places where the works of, say, his younger contemporary Michelangelo bulk large. But Leonardo's unfinished masterworks--paintings such as the Mona Lisa, which he considered incomplete and never surrendered to its commissioner, and his scientific notebooks, of which only a third are known to survive--confirm his towering intelligence. Nuland, surgeon-author of How We Die (1993) and The Mysteries Within [BKL D 15 99], elegantly sketches Leonardo's life of constant employment by noblemen eager to enjoy the prestige he reflected on them and of even more constant curiosity, which drove him to become the greatest anatomist before Vasari. Indeed, he was better than Vasari, for he pioneered methods of anatomical rendering and made discoveries that weren't repeated until as late as the twentieth century. A scintillating addition to the Penguin Lives series. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


The New York Review of Books
[Nuland’s] own professional expertise enables him to write with particular insight and authority.


Scientific American
In this brief life, Nuland summarizes Leonardo’s achievements skillfully.


The Seattle Times
Nuland’s enthusiasm and knowledge make his story interesting and easy to read.


Book Description
The life and work of the great Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (1452– 1519) have proved endlessly fascinating for generations. In Leonardo da Vinci, Sherwin Nuland completes his twenty-year quest to understand an unlettered man who was a painter, architect, engineer, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. What was it that propelled Leonardo’s insatiable curiosity? Nuland finds clues in his subject’s art, relationships, and scientific studies—as well as in a vast quantity of notes that became widely known in the twentieth century. Scholarly and passionate, Nuland’s Leonardo da Vinci takes us deep into the first truly modern, empirical mind, one that was centuries ahead of its time.


From the Publisher
3 1.5-hour cassettes


About the Author
Sherwin Nuland, M.D., is the author of bestselling nonfiction titles including How We Die, for which he won the National Book Award. He is clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also teaches medical history and bioethics.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The life and work of the great Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (1452￯﾿ﾽ1519) have proved endlessly fascinating for generations. In Leonardo da Vinci, Sherwin Nuland completes his twenty-year quest to understand an unlettered man who was a painter, architect, engineer, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. What was it that propelled Leonardo's insatiable curiosity? Nuland finds clues in his subject's art, relationships, and scientific studies—as well as in a vast quantity of notes that became widely known in the twentieth century. Scholarly and passionate, Nuland's Leonardo da Vinci takes us deep into the first truly modern, empirical mind, one that was centuries ahead of its time.