Neo Leo: The Ageless Ideas of Leonardo da Vinci
By Gene Barretta
Henry Holt and Co., $16.99, 40 pages
More often than not, Leonardo da Vinci gets put in a box together with Rembrandt, Monet, Michelangelo, Picasso, and Van Gogh. While all of these artists are to be revered and appreciated, many would agree that Leonardo da Vinci far exceeded all their combined talents. He was a true genius, somewhat in the same category as Nikola Tesla. Da Vinci was a real visionary and way beyond his years with his ideas and contraptions, but there was much more to him than that. In Neo Leo, author Gene Barretta presents us with da Vinci’s other brilliant abilities that are often overlooked. As a follow up to Now and Ben, where past and present events were illustrated and compared in opposite pages, Neo Leo cleverly shows how da Vinci’s dreams-many of which were inspired by his study of nature-foreshadowed modern inventions, offering a window to the future.
Neo Leo is a wealth of historical information with which kids will surely love to be familiar. Many of us grew up in an era where there was no Internet, and information such as what Barretta presents here could only be found in the most insipid way-perusing library stacks of thick books with crusty pages and gleaning what we could from microscopic fonts in the footnotes of confusing research books. Today’s generation is very fortunate to have resources such as this book, which provides them with colorful, vivid, relatable material that will make them eager to learn. The book will inspire them to research other topics to understand da Vinci’s genius better; my own daughter had to look up some of the names that appeared in this book like The Wright Brothers, Otto Lilienthal, Thomas Edison, Thomas Paine, and Jacques Cousteau, to name a few. Neo Leo is an educational success because the details presented elicit curiosity and a desire to learn more. The author is to be commended for his ability to pull his desired audience back to opening a book and reading through its pages, which is very hard to do since we are in the age of modern technology when our young often prefer gaining knowledge through audio-visual means rather than from printed media. Even the most computer savvy child will be intrigued and inspired by this book.
The illustrations are done in a whimsical, yet detailed manner. Remarkable renderings that only a meticulous artist like Barretta could do (like “Mona Lisa” and the hand drawings of da Vinci) are comically strewn all over the pages of this wonderful read. Pay attention to the tidbits as well, because they provide further enlightenment about da Vinci’s idiosyncrasies. Make sure you have a mirror on hand to read some of his inscriptions, which you may mistake initially as typographical errors. If you want to make the Renaissance come alive for your children or students, this book is the way to go… and maybe, just maybe, the world would be a much better place with young aspiring Neo-Leos in it.
Reviewed by Kaye Cloutman
