indeed! The biography of Leonardo was an amazing read. Highly recommend it
The same author who wrote some other famous biographies. I know some people prefer other DaVinci's biographies. I didn't read others to be able to compare, but I really enjoyed this one.
It's like "Jesus of Nazareth"; you wouldn't talk about "other OfNazareth's biographies". Ain't grammatical.
Yes, modern surnames largely evolved from descriptive epithets added to distinguish different people of the same given name, but that doesn't retroactively transform the descriptive epithets of commonly applied to people who lived in the past into surnames for those people.
Wikipedia says that Leonardo da Vinci was properly Leonardo son of Piero from Vinci son of Antonio son of another Piero son of Guido. I'm not sure that moving to surnames was a mistake, you know.
Da Vinci is a shorthand that everyone will understand vs just calling him Leonardo. Writing Leonardo da Vinci will be more explicit but will come off much more formal and stilted.
That's not in common use, so wouldn't fall under descriptive linguistics. No English speaker was puzzled at whether Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was about someone else from Vinci's code. It's an established convention at this point.