It doesn't take much to be a Renaissance Man in this day and age. Do you know how to change the oil in your car and know the author of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT? Well, you just might be a Renaissance Man. Can you make radish roses as well as sand a bookcase? Goodness me, you're a Renaissance Man! Do you do well on "Jeopardy" and "Wheel of Fortune?" Heavens to Betsy --- Renaissance Man! There used to be much more to it than that. Of course, the Renaissance was a revival of classical art, literature, and learning that originated in Italy in the 14th century and spread throughout Europe. If you were a Renaissance Man from back then, you might have been someone like Leonardo da Vinci. He was a painter, architect, engineer, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Not many so-called "Renaissance Men" of today could hold a candle to one Mr. da Vinci. Sherwin B. Nuland takes a look at quite possibly the most famous man ever to live.

Nuland, a Clinical Professor of Surgery at Yale University, continues the informative and well-received Penguin Lives series with his short biography. Others in the Penguin Lives series include Edna O'Brien's look at James Joyce and Mary Gordon's biography of Joan of Arc. Soon to come include John Keegan on Winston Churchill, Jane Smiley on Charles Dickens, and Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis Presley.

"The enigma of the Mona Lisa's smile is not less than the enigma of her creator's life force." Leonardo da Vinci was born in the Spring of 1452 to a successful notary father and a mother whose personal information is sparse at best. The facts of the life of Leonardo da Vinci are sparse as well.

A man with a "near-idolatrous fascination with the life of Leonardo da Vinci," Nuland uses broad brush strokes in discussing his idol. "The probings of his mind had gone well beyond the supporting knowledge and technology of his era. Had much more been available, it would certainly have released his genius to fly as far in reality as it did in his conjectures and fantasies."

When da Vinci was young he went into a cave and found a large fossil fish within it. Nuland then writes, "The significant thing to note about Leonardo's experience in the cave is that it resulted in a discovery...centuries before the studies of such as Lyell and Darwin --- that the earth and its living forms were much older than was taught by the Church, and are in a continuous state of change." The question then is, how does Nuland know what young da Vinci was thinking when he saw the fish?

Anatomy takes up a bulk of the short tome, for Nuland is a surgeon and is interested in such things. But what of da Vinci's great artistic abilities? "The Last Supper" and the "Mona Lisa?" What of his engineering feats? What of his interest in mathematics? These are all touched on, certainly, but with Nuland's focus on anatomy, much of what da Vinci is most noted for is only glanced over.

I knew very little of da Vinci the man, and in that regard, LEONARDO DA VINCI is a good little book for me to have read. His life, however mysterious and unknowable it is, did come through. Facts were interspersed with conjecture, his writings were interspersed with interpretation, and Sherwin Nuland continued his idolatrous fascination with a man well-ahead of his time.

Now, I have to go out and fix the power mower before I can watch a documentary on lemurs. That's me, a regular Renaissance Man.