Raiding between the lines
Martin Kemp
LEONARDO: THE ARTIST AND THE MAN by Serge Bramly Michael Joseph, £20, pp. 493 Why write biographies of artists? We SO take it for granted that something in the life holds the key to an artist's works that this question is rarely asked, other than by a coterie of academic theorists who argue that all we can ever hope to do is to lay bare the linguistic and social codes of a text or picture. The great majority of us assume that there are discernible intentions behind the making of the world of art and that the understanding of how these intentions arise during the course of a career provides a major source of insight into the work's creation. Thus, the typical art-historical monograph lays out the bare framework of the life as an armature on which to hang critical analyses of the works in terms of What the artist is trying to say. The kind of biography written by Serge Bramly goes further in giving unquestioned priority to the life, so that the 'artist' only emerges as the direct expression of the 'man'. This method may seen unexceptionable given his assumption that art is a form of auto- matic self-expression. But this way of approaching a historical figure seems to me to present all kinds of problems. The most fundamental dilemma is Whether we can read the works directly from the life. We may look at Caravaggio, Who lived a notably turbulent life, and see his often harshly expressive creations as manifestations of his temperament. But What are we to make of the Renaissance goldsmith and sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, who had lead an even more violently crimi- nal existence and yet created works of the most suave courtliness? And what do we do With makers of sublime works whose careers are poorly documented or irre- deemably dull? Can we really hope to grasp what is important about Shakespeare Irdm scratching around in the detritus of his biography? Some artists, of course, positively seem to invite the biographical treatment. In L•oonardo's case we can draw upon the documented outline of a reasonably pic- turesque career in contact with some of the notable characters of his time, including
Niccolo Machiavelli in Florence and Francis I of France. And, above all, we have the thousands of pages from his note- books, which reveal more of his intellectual life than is available for any other Renais- sance personality. However, as Bramly notes, the voluminous writings contain hardly anything that can be regarded as an expression of personal sentiment. There- fore, 'to find Leonardo the man, one has to read between the lines'.
When we learn that Leonardo recorded the death of his father in a dry memoran- dum (twice) are we to read this as indicat- ing a cool distance between Ser Piero da Vinci, the state notary, and his illegitimate son, and as evidence of emotional repres- sion in someone who had been removed at a tender age from the care of his natural mother? A disconcerting letter in which the artist warns his half brother that by bring- ing a new-born son into the world he had actually 'engendered a vigilant enemy', leads Bramly to speculate that Leonardo
Detail from a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, c.- 1519
detested `Ser Piero to this extent'.
We are entering territory which provides a potentially rich hunting ground for the psychologist, and we know that Freud did not resist the temptation to chase the quar- ry of Leonardo's inner self. Bramly tells us that
it would take a tome to exhaust the possibili- ties of Leonardo's complex sexuality.
I'm afraid this kind of nonsense just won't wash. We are asking questions which the historical record only allows us to answer by imposing on it a series of anachronistic readings and arbitrary assumptions. Leonardo's letter to his half-brother might well be understood as a bit of brotherly irony, which would have raised a chuckle from the recipient, who well knew Leonar- do's odd sense of humour. Equally, the memorandum of his father's death may have been written coolly as a way of com-
ing to terms with genuine grief. As far as I can see, there is no way of knowing. It is dangerous to assume that we can see more than blank paper between the lines.
Even if we can prove that Leonardo's psychological constitution was such-and- such, does it really matter? Would it provide the key to his art? I very much doubt it. His depictions of the Virgin and Child in the lap of St Anne were seen by Freud as evidence of his search for his double mother — the one he lost and the step-mother who raised him. But composi- tions of this theme were much in the air in republican Florence around 1500, since St Anne was regarded as a republican saint by the Florentines. Bramly attempts to have it both ways, noting that the subject was far from unusual but attributing Leonardo's revitalising of the theme to 'events in his own life'. But, if we accept this way of thinking, was his revitalising of the theme of the 'Last Supper' a reflection of some profound experience at the dinner table? What is important is to look at the worlds of art, the multitudinous drawing and writ- ings in terms of what they actually commu- nicate, using rigorous analysis of historical context to understand how they carried meaning then and how we might better comprehend those features that can still affect us today.
Bramly is actually rather good on the his- torical context. He has conducted extensive research and provides some telling inter- pretations of uncertain points in the sources. His approach is sober rather than sensational, to the extent that the effect tends to be rather flat — certainly in Sian Reynolds's staid translation of the original French. However, in the last analysis Bram- ly is in the business of imputing an emotional life which is taken as explaining the works. Somehow no amount of imput- ing can capture the awesome intensity with which Leonardo scrutinised the forms and functions of the created universe, how he seized upon elements in traditional learn- ing to forge his own special sense of the inner harmonies of man and nature, and how his means of visual expression can adjust our insight into what we see. Un- fortunately, the visual aspects of Leonardo have been disgracefully served by the publisher. The black-and-white illustra- tions, which are scattered throughout the book in random defiance of the chronology of the text, are sooty and crude, some obviously having been derived from second- or third-hand sources, while the scanty colour plates are generally disgust- ing. The piece de resistance is the reproduc- ing of the 'Adoration of the Magi' in reverse. The reader will learn a good deal about the story of Leonardo's life from Bramly's book but given little real help in looking more discerningly at the master's visual legacy.
Martin Kemp is the author of Leonardo da Vinci, published by Yale in 1989.
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