If you are going to measure genius as only pertaining to math, science and engineering, in the modern senses of the word, then sure. In addition to art you are now excluding music, literature, history, politics, warfare, philosophy, finance, economics, ethics, law, and many other important areas of thought that shape our world.
Da Vinci areas of interest and activity were broad and novel. He was part of the milieu that brought about the modern world.
If you insist on one magic achievement, which seems a bit childish and over simplistic to me, call him a visual synthesist. He worked in modeling and visualization. I'll leave pigeonholing him into a modern discipline up to you. He really predated those holes, which are fuzzy and overlapping at best.
He, along with the other artists and thinkers of his time, created the modern concept of a visual representation. Something so basic and fundamental, and so divergent from what went before, that many people today, totally immersed in it, simply can't see it. It's like the air to them. Any time you see a working drawing, a photographic composition, a narrative image, or a pictorial observation, you are looking at a direct descendant of his tradition.
(Caravaggio, by the way, was a direct stylistic descendant of Da Vinci, visually quoting him several times.)
Da Vinci areas of interest and activity were broad and novel. He was part of the milieu that brought about the modern world.
If you insist on one magic achievement, which seems a bit childish and over simplistic to me, call him a visual synthesist. He worked in modeling and visualization. I'll leave pigeonholing him into a modern discipline up to you. He really predated those holes, which are fuzzy and overlapping at best.
He, along with the other artists and thinkers of his time, created the modern concept of a visual representation. Something so basic and fundamental, and so divergent from what went before, that many people today, totally immersed in it, simply can't see it. It's like the air to them. Any time you see a working drawing, a photographic composition, a narrative image, or a pictorial observation, you are looking at a direct descendant of his tradition.
(Caravaggio, by the way, was a direct stylistic descendant of Da Vinci, visually quoting him several times.)