Leonardo da Vinci: celebrity, genius, enigma

Stephen Campbell does a learned, lively and convincing demolition job in Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life (Princeton University Press, 352 pp, $37/£30, published in the UK on April 1). It removes—like Salome’s seven veils or layers of archeological encrustations—the many contemporary distortions of Leonardo and places the artist in a less fanciful but more authentic historical context.  He writes that “his book is about Leonardo’s resistance to becoming a subject of biography, as well as the gaps in the historical record that have invited projection and fictionalisation”.  He insists that “any claim to explain Leonardo that isolates him from his milieu will be misguided and anachronistic”.

Leonardo provides a striking contrast to his contemporary Michelangelo, who left “a rich deposit of personal correspondence, business records, highly personal poetry and many narratives of his life by acquaintances.”  As Kenneth Clark already noted, “Of Leonardo’s affections, his tastes, his health, of his opinions of current events, we know nothing.”  The few known facts of his life state that he was the illegitimate son of a successful notary in Vinci, a small village 25 miles west of  Florence.  He was apprenticed, at the same time as Botticelli, in the workshop of his master Andrea del Verocchio.  He wrote and painted with his left hand.  Skilled in music and oratory, he practiced human dissection, studied optics, and was an accomplished inventor and military engineer.  He wrote several books and had many pupils.  He lived a haphazard, unpredictable life and left many works unfinished.

His sexual life and attitudes were intriguing.  In 1476 he was tried for sodomy and acquitted.  Pretty boys, removed from the protection of their families and living in the master’s workshop under his complete authority, often engaged in sex with their elders.  According to Machiavelli, Campbell writes, “homosexual behaviour involving adolescents and older men was widespread in Florence, an accepted fact of life if not exactly approved of”.

In one shocking passage from his manuscripts, Leonardo found sex slightly palatable but essentially disgusting: “The act of coitus and the parts employed therein are so repulsive that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actions and the frantic state of mind, nature would lose the human species.”  But another passage, whose sexual implications Campbell ignores, reveals Leonardo’s fright and fascination with the sexual act.  He records, when ostensibly writing about entering a forbidding cavern, that “two emotions arose in me, fear and desire: fear of the threatening dark cave, desire to see whether there were any wondrous things within it.”

Leonardo, whose talents and genius were recognized by cultured monarchs in Italy and France, combined scientific observation with artistic sensibility.  Cultivating wide-ranging contacts, he “appeared between the court, the workshop and the military encampment, and had social and professional relations with craftsmen, humanists, courtiers and merchants.”  A friend recorded that he was often distracted by his studies, “devotes much of his time to geometry and has no fondness at all for the paintbrush.”  His excessive deliberation led to ponderous inaction.  He would study his picture, make a few strokes of paint, then be diverted to another project.  He tired of work soon after beginning it and completed few paintings.  Campbell explains the effect of cataclysmic events: “his projects came to nothing, in large part because they were broken off during political and military crises, and there was barely time for them to evolve beyond the drafting stage.”

The artist was an Overreacher, the type described by Christopher Marlowe and Friedrich Nietzsche, who tried to achieve the impossible, and whose unfinished projects and paintings stimulated the imagination of his viewers.  Franz Kafka also left his two major novels, The Trial and The Castle, unfinished.  He too tried to achieve impossible perfection and was also distracted by political events: World War One and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918.  Kafka was also exhausted by his work in an insurance company and fatally weakened by tuberculosis.  He burned a great deal of his fiction and instructed his executor to do the same (Max Brod wisely disobeyed him).  The great overreaching unfinished architectural example, Antoni Gaudi’s gigantic Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona, began in construction in 1882 and is still far from complete.

A tsunami of 250 books about Leonardo was published on the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death in 2019.  Campbell laments that biographical consumerism “has encouraged a constant repackaging of the same materials in ways that give the appearance of novelty”.  He forcefully rejects the myths surrounding Leonardo, the “archival cherry-picking” and “fragmentary information that repetition has turned into fact,” and rightly emphasises the importance of placing him in the cultural context of Renaissance Italy.

Modern entrepreneurs have “turned a long-dead Renaissance artist and part-time engineer into a twenty-first-century media celebrity”.  As with Shakespeare, whose life despite centuries of research remains obscure, desperate biographers try to fill the gaps by inventing details and imagining scenes.  As David Hockney regretfully observed, just as drawing is no longer taught in art schools, so poorly trained art historians “are really woeful at actually looking at pictures”.  They don’t describe what is really in the painting, but what they hope to find and wish to see.  Scholars want fame, promotion and grants; museums want blockbuster exhibitions that gain prestige and earn huge amounts of money.  So, Campbell caustically observes, “since the documents don’t give us what we need, we have fabricated a series of phantom Da Vincis that mostly resemble ourselves. . . . The most trivial ‘finding’ about the artist, the most hopeless new attribution, the most lurid conspiracy theory, the most preposterous evaluation kept the ghost of Da Vinci before the public.”  The prevailing attitude is: “se non è vero, è ben trovato.”

Leonardo as a fictional creation was always more intriguing as myth or symbol than as a historical person.  Giorgio Vasari, the contemporary biographer of Renaissance artists, bequeathed the image of the atheist Leonardo that the nineteenth-century Romantics adopted as the Faustian seeker of truth.  The Victorian Walter Pater claimed that in The Head of Medusa, part of a corpse, “the fascination of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty.”

Campbell shows that “modern writers “promise to gratify the need for a ‘real’ Leonardo by offering a fake one.”  The paucity  of evidence about Leonardo’s life and character “spirals rapidly into speculation, psychological projection, fictive conversations and the making of characters with human interest.”  He warns that “each of the anachronistic identities assigned to Leonardo (gay, vegetarian, pro-animal rights, a religious agnostic) is supported only by excising Leonardo’s works and pictures from their historical context.”

By contrast to such fanciful life-writers, Campbell carefully analyses Leonardo’s paintings and would have strengthened his book by spending more time on them.  It’s strange that the artist, with his passionate interest in science, was unaware that using oil paint on plaster would make The Last Supper (Milan: Santa Maria delle Grazie, 1495-98) rapidly decay.  In the long horizontal painting, depicting the moment when Christ announces, “one of you shall betray me” (Matthew 26:21), the four groups of Apostles—with Judas’ hand on a bag of money— react in distinct ways with shock and horror.

The Last Supper Restored – Leonardo Da Vinci

The young favorite Cecilia Gallerani, the Lady with an Ermine (Krakow: Czartoryski Museum, 1488-90), was distinguished in the Milanese court of Duke Ludovico il Moro “for her intellectual gifts, her love of music, philosophy and literature”. Campbell notes that the form of her hand echoes “the animal’s head”.  But the physical resemblance is much closer: the lady and the ermine have the same high forehead, widely spaced dark eyes, sharp nose, thin lips and pale skin.  Campbell adds, “ermines resist being handled by humans and cannot be domesticated.  The whole point of Leonardo’s portrait is that Cecilia, by her grace and virtue, has made gentle a fierce and untamable creature.”

Lady with an Ermine – Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo’s most innovative technique eliminated sharp outlines, “rendered softly modeled bodies and faces in crepuscular light”, and created sombre spaces, bodies in smoky shadow and muted colour.  The elusive figure in Mona Lisa (Paris: Louvre, 1500-06) emerges from a dark background and conveys a three-dimensional effect.  The great art connoisseur Bernard Berenson disliked the cult of Leonardo, the myths that had developed around the Mona Lisa and had bewitched him in his youth.  He was pleased to hear that Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and didn’t care that it was recovered in Italy in 1913.  Giorgio Vasari recorded that when Leonardo painted the portrait he surrounded the sitter with “people who played or sang, and made jokes continuously to keep her merry”—though she looks more mysterious than merry in the painting.  Campbell explains that the erosion of rock by water in the background creates “the contrast between a tender face and rugged mountains . . . the delicacy of a young wife versus the inhuman inhospitable vastness of nature.”

Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci,

Campbell’s conclusion about “the most powerful contemporary responses to Leonardo” is disappointing, weird, even ludicrous.  A Black disabled dance performer as a solo Vitruvian Man and a multiracial team of actors performing the Notebooks are certainly diverse and politically correct.  This virtuous claim might have worked for the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who had an African great-grandfather.  But these interpretations don’t bring us any closer to Leonardo.  They are, in fact, more remote from the artist’s cultural background than all the biographies that Campbell roundly condemns.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real.

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