This article is a (one of many) in recent time due to promotion of new book: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1501139150" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-Isaacson/dp/150...</a><p>Not to deny Leonardo's might, but quite similar to the pattern of (e.g.) more Depeche Mode songs on the radio signals new album/tour.
The book was published yesterday, and I just got it this morning.<p>I just got finished with the first 150 pages, and this book is amazingly great at conveying how obsessed with knowledge he had while dissecting all of his works. Highly recommend everyone to read it.
There is no way that men like Da Vinci and Newton were easy to be around, they were so beyond the norm in intelligence that they probably came off as abrasive and severely arrogant.
Did anyone else find the ostentacious sentence structuring in the article distracting, and a little infuriating? Sure, writing is an art form; I get it. I sometimes wonder if this very thing is what readers of <i>The New Yorker</i> actually want.
The idea that Europe went from the middle ages into the Reinassance unassisted thanks to a handful of people in Italy is eurocentric revisionism.<p>What really happened was:<p>After the Spanish Reconquista (the fall of Al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain), the Toledo school of translators translated all the material brought from early Islamic Universities (aka Madrasas) into Latin. Those books were then used in the first European universities and scholar centers such as Oxford.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th_century" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...</a><p>...also the Islamic empire was razed to the ground by the Mongols after the Siege of Baghdad. A bunch of knowledge carefully collected for centuries conveniently fell in European hands and today we have this urban myth of people like Leonardo Da Vinci figuring it all out on his own.<p>There is merit in the Reinassance and people like Leonardo, but they are a part of an uninterrupted chain of teaching and learning, not reclusive geniuses that came out with all the answers out of nowhere, a premise that has been used as the foundation for an arrogant sense of exceptionalism.<p>You can downvote this all you want but it won't make it false.
If you're going to read one bio from HN today, the one to read is the Joni Mitchell one and not this:<p><a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/16/16476254/joni-mitchell-pop-music-canon" rel="nofollow">https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/16/16476254/joni-mit...</a><p>(This one is also good, the Joni Mitchell one was just better.)