In Renaissance Man, Adam Gopnik reviews a pair of new books on Leonarda da Vinci:
Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it. He put wings on pet lizards and called them dragons; scribbled pyramidal parachutes in the margins of manuscripts which, more than five hundred years later, turn out to work perfectly; dashed off a letter to the Ottoman sultan offering to design a bridge that would span the Golden Horn (and the bridge he sketched, built elsewhere a few years ago, in a scaled-down version, not only is perfectly engineered but anticipates the look of Eero Saarinen?s T.W.A. terminal). He drew the Deluge, imagined the modern mortar, and fixed a half smile in the world?s imagination, and there was no one else around doing anything like it.