A genius long ago

Leonardo’s Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the world

Leonardo was certainly a genius – a great artist, a pioneering thinker in an astonishing array of fields and a polymath without peer. He was not, however, a time traveller or a magician. He was a man of his time whose ideas were firmly rooted in 15th and 16th century Italy.

The myth is a tempting one. We’ve all seen those drawings from his notebooks where he apparently sketches plans for submarines, helicopters and other fantastic machines, centuries before they became technologically feasible.