Renaissance man in all his richness
David Ekserdjian
LEONARDO DA VINCI: THE FLIGHTS OF THE MIND by Charles Nicholl Allen Lane, £25, pp. 502, ISBN 0713994932 t £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 LEONARDO by Martin Kemp OUP, £14.99, pp. 286, ISBN 0192805460 't £12.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Tre major challenge faced by biogaphers of artists is the almost impossible one of dealing with equal authority with their lives and works. It is tempting to wonder whether this is not one of the reasons why so few of them are written by art historians, although there are of course heroic exceptions, of which John Richardson's ongoing Picasso is perhaps the most illustrious.
In the specific case of Leonardo da Vinci, there is the additional problem of the seeming universality of his range of interests, above all in the direction of the sciences. Charles Nicholl's approach is explicitly to start from Leonardo's writings, not just about optics, anatomy, and so on, but also about such less elevated concerns as the day's shopping list. In less sensitive hands. this could be construed as a deliberate decision to cut the magus down to size, but actually what it achieves is to allow us to envisage the creator of the 'Mona Lisa' and the 'Last Supper' going about his daily business, and perhaps above all to get to know something of his entourage — the scoundrelly Salai. a delinquent of limitless seductive charm (for Leonardo, if no one else), and the dependable but no less enticing Francesco Melzi. Nicholl is also very good on Leonardo's patrons and their worlds, and rightly emphasises the literally murderous charisma of the likes of Cesare Borgia. He is not averse to the occasional psychoanalytic speculation, and some of Leonardo's weirder musings — and not just the famous primal memory of childhood that attracted Freud's attention — are hard not to interpret as the unwitting products of his unconscious, but on the whole he resists any temptation to turn speculations into truths. Only when he constructs a scenario involving the apparently single-mindedly homosexual Leonardo having sex with a woman from Cremona for quasi-experimental purposes did I wholly lose faith. It is true that this snippet is based upon the testimony of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, writing in the late 16th century in Milan, but one has a disconcerting sense that just this once the author has cast caution to the winds, and instead wants to believe it because it suits his agenda.
When it comes to the art, Nicholl is as a rule pretty reliable, but it is clear that in the main he is paraphrasing received opinion rather than making up his own mind. He has obviously looked at Leonardo's own works carefully, but he does not know nearly as much about Renaissance art more generally, and irritating little errors creep in. An example is his paralleling of Leonardo's unfinished 'Saint Jerome' now in the Vatican (the subject of a brilliant and total ly forgotten short article in the Burlington Magazine by the youthful Brian Sewell) with Domenico Ghirlandaio's fresco of the same saint in the church of Ognissanti in Florence, which could only have been invoked by someone who had no knowledge of the latter work, for the simple reason that whereas Leonardo showed Jerome beating his breast in the wilderness, Ghirlandaio opted for the other favourite iconography and represented him in all his cardinal's finery in his study. Martin Kemp would not make that kind of mistake. Although it may seem extraordinary that any individual can lay claim to such a title, he truly is — in the words of the fly-leaf of his new study — 'the world's leading authority on Leonardo'. He published a justly acclaimed full-dress monograph on Leonardo in 1980, but naturally he has continued to reflect and research on his hero, and other scholars have also made important contributions, not least Martin Clayton of the Royal Library at Windsor and Carmen Bambach of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In consequence, while his new book is far from being simply an updating of the old one, it does not seek to supplant it either. On the contrary, neither will relieve a serious reader from the enjoyable necessity of reading the other, and for all that it is less substantial in its scale and less comprehensive in its scope than the earlier work, the most telling difference between them is arguably the method of organisation, which is more uninhibitedly thematic here. it is also even more concerned with Leonardo's science, to such an extent that I began wonder if art was ever going to get a look-in, but in the event the penultimate chapter is a magisterial overview of how Leonardo went about making pictures, and above all of the ways in which he transformed previous practice to such a degree that we take his innovations for granted. This is eloquently illustrated by Kemp in terms of Leonardo's 'brainstorming' drawings, and also in connection with the new kind of relationship he established between sitters and beholders in the context of portraiture (where the earlier contributions of Antonello da Messina and Giovanni Bellini are acknowledged). On occasion, there are signs of haste in the writing; the self-congratulatory tone of the preface, with its revelation that the first draft of the entire book was written in Vinci in ten spezzatura-packed days is a bit tiresome, but much can be forgiven to someone who can produce passages as luminous and thought-provoking as his envoi to the 'Mona Lisa':
No image has ever been more particular in the way it engages us with a specific human presence. No picture of an individual has ever borne such universalising truths about the indissolubility of our lives within the life of the world.
Both authors convincingly agree that the reference dating from 1525 in an inventory of Salai's possessions to a painting called 'La honda' (short for 'Gioconda') can only refer to the 'Mona Lisa', but neither recognises that this dry notarial particular must retain a haunting echo of Leonardo's voice. Nicholl imagines that the 'h' is silent, and therefore translates the title as 'the wave' (eat your heart out, Hokusai), but in Tuscan to this day 'c's are pronounced as Just as Coca-Cola becomes HohaHola, so, when Leonardo spoke about it, the Gioconda must have become the Giohonda.
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