This is an interesting if not mind-boggling look into the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, a man considered ahead of his time. His notebooks are full of diving apparatuses, flying machines, tanks all kinds of things that show him to be a great genius.
Though he was a great genius, this mini-documentary states, his genius was in his fantastic art. In actuality, many of these inventions were crudely created by people Leonardo knew: Luca Pacioli, Taccola, whose drawings are similar to Leonardo's, including the Vetruvian man, DiGiorgio. There are records from the 15th Century, such as the Sianese manuscripts, that show inventions for bringing man underwater. Yet a google search will show that Leonardo himself is credited with these inventions, though he never took credit for them.
"We must put Leonardo in context," one of the experts says. What da Vinci did was improve upon many of these inventions and make them more workable.
In the end, despite all his work in other areas, da Vinci's art is the star. An amazing machine using infrared light and capturing 240 pixels per minute can now look at his paintings and see how they were constructed, layer by layer. Seeing how his work was constructed shows his genius to be even more evident.
Narrated by Brian Dennehy, with experts speaking throughout, the documentary serves as a reminder that, in one way or another, many stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. And in da Vinci's case, he often refined what went before to make it better.