User:Jodon1971/Leonardo

The following was a proposed addition the section Fame and reputation in the article Leonardo da Vinci, as suggested by User:Amandajm. It was eventually rejected for reasons given on the talk pages of User Talk:Amandajm#Leonardo da Vinci and User Talk:Jodon1971#Leonardo. View the addition HERE to see how it would have appeared integrated into the section. -- Jodon | Talk 04:15, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Fame and Reputation (addition)

Leonardo’s fame continued to spread in the 18th and 19th century thanks to the Romantic Movement, with writers such as Goethe and Houston Stewart Chamberlain assessing Leonardo the scientist in the context of his own time. While Vasari may have contributed to the early mythologicalization of Leonardo, 20th Century writers such as Kenneth Clark and Martin Kemp subsequently attempted to to demystify the legend and present him as a man, without diminishing his extraordinariness. The discovery in 1964 of another of Leonardo's notebooks helped to cement the idea of Leonardo as both artist and scientist in the public mind. By the end of the 20th Century interest in Leonardo’s status as an historical icon continued with an ever increasing number of reference books and biographies being published about him. Amazon.com, as of March 2013, has an estimated 21,336 publications on, or relating to Leonardo. In his book Leonardo, Martin Kemp equates the current popularity of Leonardo to an "industry".

Leonardo's genius has been the subject of much debate, for both experts and non-experts alike. Efforts to rank the world's greatest geniuses have often placed Leonardo among "the greatest". In 1926 American psychologist Catherine Cox published Early Mental Traits of 300 Geniuses, and Leonardo was ranked 27th with an estimated IQ of 180. In 1994, a study was conducted by Tony Buzan and Raymond Keene and the results were published in their book – Buzan's Book of Genius. Of 100 geniuses studied, Leonardo scored highest in IQ (scoring 220) and GS (Genius Score - on an 835-point scale, scoring 822). Michael Gelb's book How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps To Genius Every Day claims Leonardo is the greatest genius of all time. On Rankopedia, an online poll, Leonardo was voted by non-experts as being the greatest genius who ever lived. A 2010 common street poll ranked Leonardo as the second smartest person of all time. On the other hand some critics argue that his genius is overestimated and that his IQ could not have been any more than 160, since many of his inventions were failures, and that he had only a rudimentary grasp of Latin and Mathematics. Defenders of Leonardo's genius however claim that such critics are taking their assessments out of context and neglecting other aspects.