While racing along a freeway with air conditioner humming and a CD blasting as the glassy towers of a modern metropolis rise beyond a tangle of interlocking freeways, I often wonder, "What would Leonardo think?"
Of all the Renaissance geniuses — and there were many — Leonardo da Vinci is the most like us: skeptical, inquisitive, observant, a DIY tinkerer always trying something new.
Now popularly identified as the painter of "Mona Lisa," he was, in fact, a jack-of-all-trades who is being celebrated in "Leonardo da Vinci, the 'Codex Leicester' and the Creative Mind," opening Sunday at Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA).
Although he lived in an age of fortified cities ringed with thick stone walls and towers, Leonardo was forever pushing the conceptual envelope by designing canals, bridges and transportation (flying machines, armored tanks) that couldn't be realized with 15th- century technology.
He would have been over the moon with access to carbon fiber, plastics, 3-D printers, reinforced concrete, steel and plate glass — to say nothing about electricity.
Long before colleges invented science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors, Leonardo (1452-1519) was deep into those fields. In his own day, he was known as an engineer, architect, inventor, mathematician, cartographer, gadgeteer, musician and party planner for aristocratic courts.
There are no paintings in the MIA's exhibit, which is built around a rare notebook of Leonardo's that Microsoft founder Bill Gates bought for a record-setting $30.8 million in 1994. Instead, the exhibit presents Leonardo as the prototype of the creative thinker, a guy whose jottings are a fount of ideas in evolution.
Half of the show is devoted to notebooks and projects by 21st-century American inventors and artists whose products include Rollerblades, infant car seats, crocheted models of "hyperbolic geometry" and a video interpretation of a legendary 19th-century French painting.
