Oxford professor Martin Kemp is one of the world's leading experts on Leonardo Da Vinci, and not surprisingly, was enraged by Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, and the news coverage that followed. Less surprisingly, he was more sanguine about the film, which took the story to an even wider audience.

Prof Kemp said: "If you work with Leonardo, you are living with legends. I've been doing that for 30 years. It's a remarkable thing: almost everybody has an interest in him. So that's a great advantage. If people are interested, then you can tell them what you think he was up to.

"The Da Vinci Code I initially thought was very pernicious, not so much in terms of Leonardo but that it perverted our whole idea of approach to history. There's no respect for the distinction between fact and fiction.

"That's fine for a fictional work but it was paraded around as founded on a bedrock of truth. I'm now rather more relaxed about it because the film was so bad about it on the whole that it undermined the whole business."

He studied natural sciences at Cambridge before postgraduate studies in art history at the Courtauld Institute in London, so is one of the few art historians who can look at Da Vinci with a scientific eye. "I wasn't really looking to putting the two together, but a trainee television producer who was doing his diploma programme had decided rather eccentrically to do it on Leonardo's water drawings.

"He had asked around and it got knocked down to me. Ernst Gombrich, the great art and cultural historian, gave me a copy of a paper he had not yet published on the water drawings and that triggered an interest in Leonardo, and to some extent, as somebody who had been trained in natural sciences, the material felt familiar. So like many things in life, it was pure fluke."

Prof Kemp believes Da Vinci's work challenges today's specialists. "Somebody studying medicine or mathematics can see an extraordinary talent at work - they can see something that goes into other realms. He's become to some extent the archetypal genius. His mind is unbounded but the reason, I think, he retains a particular grip, is ultimately because his expression of these things in visual forms is extraordinary. A painting like the Mona Lisa embeds so much of his knowledge of how the world works and how we see things - and he is arguably the greatest visualiser of all time."

Prof Kemp has devoted years to studying Da Vinci's notebooks, and has now brought his knowledge to bear on a major exhibition at the V&A in London.

"One of the things that we've done in the Victoria and Albert exhibition is that we've used a lot of animations of Leonardo's drawings, which I'm bold enough to think he would have loved, to translate them into an accessible form. Some of the sheets are quite difficult. They're both working with Leonardo but also giving access to some quite tricky things."

He is also involved in the Universal Leonardo series of exhibitions, a pan-European project currently at several different venues in Oxford.

"The Universal Leonardo has been terrifically difficult. Many people said we wouldn't see it done, with endless rounds of diplomacy. In some ways, Oxford is a summation of the project because the Ashmolean has an exhibition that looks at the Leonardo's drawings which they own and some very interesting things on Leonardo's later fortune about how he is seen in drawings and prints. Christ Church, which has an excellent collection of Leonardo and Milanese drawings, has a nice little exhibition.

"The History of Science museum has picked out various things, the sort of instruments, the sort of tools, which Leonardo would have used in his day and the sort of concepts that Leonardo would have used. The Botanic Garden has a largely child-orientated exhibition on studying drawing plants and Magdalen has the greatest of the early copies of The Last Supper painted by one of Leonardo's pupils."

Prof Kemp's first book on Leonardo has been reissued and he has published a new book, Seen/Unseen: Art, Science and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope, born out of his column in the science journal Nature.

"The purpose of Seen/Unseen was not to come up with some universal explanation of art and science or both together but to look at creative tendencies in both, in certain areas which are based on perceptions of nature. My conviction was that the initial perception is shared by many artists and many scientists."

He concedes that not all scientists use visual modelling and not artists visualise nature, but he believes that it is a fundamental shared human instinct.

"The big question to my mind is whether we can develop a vision of nature which is communicable on various public stages. One of the problems we have is that we have so compartmentalised our knowledge that we're now reaping the legacy in the sense that we now do not have a proper understanding of science and technology."

He adds: "It sounds slightly preachy, but I think the stakes here are pretty big. I went to Cambridge and suddenly discovered this world which I knew nothing about - a world of art and music and film. That was a revelation."

Seen/Unseen is published by OUP at £25. Universal Leonardo runs in Oxford until November 5. Leonardo Da Vinci is at the Victoria and Albert, London, until January 7.