Leonardo da Vinci was the ultimate Renaissance man—so much so that it is often hard for us to conceive of him as a product of the Middle Ages. Yet he was born in the same year as King Richard III of England; he died several decades before the Polish scientist Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that the sun, and not the earth, might sit at the center of the heavens.* Many of Leonardo’s projects—from helicopters to diving bells—were so advanced that they were realized not in his time but in ours. He is an essentially liminal character—one who belongs to both our worlds, and who has the power to
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