As I sit in a hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona, reading The Cambridge History of Science and watching an Olympic ice hockey game between Latvia and Russia, I come to a paragraph that talks about modern misconceptions about the past:

The multifaceted “Renaissance man” is to some extent a trick of historical perspective, which creates polymathesis out of what was simply a different classification of knowledge and a different professional division of labor.

Leonardo was a man of what was considered at the time as practical arts: designer, painter, builder, engineer, and inventor. It was his professional duty to be a Renaissance man.

tags: creativity, science, art, history