Leonardo Da Vinci: The flights of the Mind
By Charles Nicholl
(Allen Lane) and
Leonardo
By Martin Kemp
(Oxford University Press)
Less than 50 years after his death, one of his earliest biographers, Georgio Vasari, attempting to capture Da Vinci’s greatness, established the tone of imaginative and verbal extravagance, which has lastingly set the parameters for all subsequent celebrations of Da Vinci’s genius.
”Leonardo was mourned out of measure by all who had known him, for there was none who had done such honour to painting. The splendour of his great beauty could calm the saddest soul, and his words could move the most obdurate mind. His great strength could restrain the most violent fury, and he could bend an iron knocker or a horseshoe as if it were lead. He was liberal to his friends, rich and poor, if they had talent and worth; and indeed as Florence had the greatest of gifts in his birth, so she suffered an infinite loss in his death.”
How many hundreds of thousands of words have been written since Vasari, trying to convey the extraordinary combination of talents and imaginative brio which made up the mind of this enigmatic man? While the exquisite drawings, maps and engineering blueprints, and the handful of paintings have consistently fascinated all who have seen them, the man himself continues to elude us.
Da Vinci would probably have regarded all those words spent on him as a mistake. Words are a poor resource for capturing complexity, according to Da Vinci.
Beneath a meticulous drawing of a dissected heart, on one of the many pages of his precise anatomical drawings now in the royal collection at Windsor, Da Vinci wrote: ”O writer! What words can you find to describe the whole arrangement of the heart as perfectly as is done in this drawing? My advice is not to trouble yourself with words unless you are speaking to the blind.”
For the visually minded Da Vinci, a graphic representation would be the most fitting and precise version to pass down to posterity. Alas, the portrait or self-portrait equivalent of such pen-and-ink precision has not survived for us.
Although Charles Nicholl, in one of two new biographies of Da Vinci, tries hard to convince us that he has identified early images of the great master among the many thousands of sheets of surviving sketches and drawings by Da Vinci and his students, none can with any certainty be proved to be the man himself.
The only almost-reliable portraits to come down to us show the great man in old age with long locks and beard — the epitome of the antique sage. There is no bold, suggestive portrait of the man in his prime.
So, like so many biographers before them, Nicholl and Martin Kemp have sought to capture the elusive essence of Da Vinci in words. And like every biographer, each attempt is deeply marked by the particular interests of the author and his age.
Where Vasari was inclined to celebrate the outstanding calibre of the work, 21st-century biographers feel the need to get inside the artist’s head, to tap into his emotional and sensual soul — and if possible to turn up some sensational piece of extracurricular activity to spice up our reading.
Kemp is the acknowledged academic expert on Da Vinci as artist and scientist. He brings to Da Vinci’s artistic production a keen understanding of Da Vinci’s excavation of the interlocking beauties of structure and form in the natural world, and a strong sense of the way a scientific mind might respond to the challenge of the visual.
For him, the most brilliant comments within the corpus of Da Vinci’s notes are those which aspire to understand an overarching system and a grand plan. Art and engineering are part of a single system of thought: ”Every act of looking and drawing was, for Leonardo, an act of analysis.”
Kemp’s Leonardo is brief and focused. Each chapter chooses a ”grand theme” and orchestrates the available information around it. In addition to its magisterial text it contains useful reading aids: a timeline of Da Vinci’s life and a gallery of reproductions of the paintings, to supplement the reproductions in the book.
Nicholl, by contrast, is a man mesmerised by the minutiae of archival evidence — the shreds of everyday life preserved accidentally for posterity, and from which the biographer-sleuth can piece together a vivid personality and a plausible career. Each shard of writing deciphered from the margins of a manuscript determines a direction for further exploration.
His Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind is an expansive volume, dense with footnotes and copiously illustrated with images from the manuscripts. In Nicholl’s patient hands, acres of undervalued and unread material are painstakingly unpicked, rewoven, and moulded into an armature which gives coherent shape to the long life of a Renaissance genius.
The more than 7 000 surviving pages of Da Vinci’s notebooks are for him a goldmine of clues, theories more or less tentatively proposed, and assertions of ”fact” boldly risked.
Like all biographers of Da Vinci before them, these two wrestle with the problem of forming coherence from the rather few, disparate fragments of ”fact” which give only shadowy shape to Da Vinci’s life.
From his opening meditation on the single phrase with which Da Vinci breaks off a page of geometrical annotations, ”because the soup is getting cold”, Nicholl proceeds to build a painstakingly constructed edifice of possibilities: ”It tells us a great deal: that Leonardo ate a bowl of lukewarm soup on a day in 1518 hardly qualifies as an important piece of biographical data.
What seems to make it special is a quality of surprise, of casualness. Into the dry abstractions of his geometrical studies has intruded this moment of simple, daily humanity.”
Some of these details — particularly regarding Leonardo’s childhood, of which we know virtually nothing — verge on the far-fetched. But what the reader gets is a rich, textured feel for the world the fatherless boy inhabited and from which he drew his later inspiration. Nicholl is always careful to warn us if he is risking a guess.
By doing so he charms the reader into trusting him elsewhere. Everything else is grounded in the surviving manuscript evidence as examined under the microscope of Nicholl’s detective-style scrutiny. The author of The Reckoning — that great speculative biography of Shakespeare’s dramatist-competitor, Christopher Marlowe — enjoys himself most when the document he is examining is apparently in code, and its status as evidence uncertain.
Indeed, there are moments when the style of argument of The Flights of the Mind closely resembles its fictional cousin, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Both books claim to ”uncover the secret behind Mona Lisa’s smile”. Both ultimately leave that enigma firmly in place. Kemp prefers to remind us that Da Vinci’s most famous painting ought to be called the ”Monna Lisa” (”Madam Lisa”).
Set these two biographies side by side and you have complementary guides for exploring Leonardo — two 21st-century attempts to make sense of a lasting enigma.
Ideally they ought to be read together: Kemp’s for the way ideas are effortlessly harnessed to the outlines of Leonardo’s life; Nicholl’s for the grain and stuff of the richly textured, almost tangible Italian Renaissance world, within which Leonardo moved, which formed the material basis for his ideas, and the currents of whose influence sustained the virtuoso upward flights of his mind. — Â