Why was Leonardo da Vinci such a genius? He was just like you and me

As a new Science Museum exhibition shows, Leonardo remains a cultural titan in the digital age because, like Shakespeare, he was an artist of the people

Leonardo da Vinci is the Shakespeare of art and engineering. Both creative titans died many centuries ago, but live so vibrantly in modern imaginations they feel like our contemporaries.

Getting into the hottest new Shakespeare production is a tricky business but this weekend, I finally watched Michael Fassbender in Macbeth. The text was too severely cropped, I thought, but it’s a marvel that in our century, which thinks itself so new, Shakespeare’s dramas are still so damned hot. It’s the same with Leonardo – witness the National Gallery queues for his blockbuster show in 2011.

Related: Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Genius review – an eye for destruction

Continue reading...