The Connection Between Art and Science

The connection between art and science is established very early in the book when author Walter Isaacson asks a curator whether he considered Leonardo's "Deluge drawings" to be works of art or science. "I do no think that Leonardo would have made that distinction," the curator responds (2). The connection between art and science and a lack of distinction between the two in Leonardo's life and works speaks to the nature of his genius (another of the book's themes) and his status as an icon of the Renaissance. Interdisciplinarity is a hallmark of both Leonardo's personal genius and the ethos of his era. Leonardo's facility with multiple disciplines and the interdisciplinary spirit of the Renaissance subverts the common contemporary notion that an individual is typically only intellectually strong in one of two opposing and unrelated types of fields. Readers may have heard this referred...