Would the real Leonardo please stand up?
It is still two years before the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s passing, but you wouldn’t know that from the attention that the maestro is getting lately. In a few weeks, Simon & Schuster is set to publish Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, author of the Steve Jobs and Einstein biographies. That book follows just five months after the publication of my book, Young Leonardo, written with my co-author Chris Brown and published by St Martin’s Press. So what’s up with all this attention around an elusive 16th century master? What is there to say about him that we don’t know already?
One reason, perhaps, is that we see something of ourselves, of our times, in this frenetic individual. Like many of today’s outliers, Leonardo never went to a proper university, never read the classics, and never mastered the fine rhetorical skills and sonnet writing that his rivals — such as Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo — excelled in. Leonardo was a “natural child,” as we say today — in Renaissance times he would simply have been called a ‘bastard’ — which meant that he was never given a proper education.
In response, Leonardo became a self-made man. He taught himself Latin — most treatises on virtually any topic were still written in Latin in those days — and, unhindered by medieval science, decided to conquer the world by observing it. In the process, he discovered something that had eluded artists for centuries: that the secret to create a truly lifelike image of a young woman, you need to replicate the way that nature shapes a face with soft, glaze-like tones of light and dark. Art historians have a fancy word for it: chiaroscuro. Leonardo invented it, and it would dominate Western art until Cezanne and the dawn of modern art. At least, that’s one of the key arguments we make in our book.
So I was curious to see what Walter Isaacson would make of this. As the editor of several academic journals, I was able to get a preview copy and read the book from cover to cover (even though the cover art itself is rather disappointing: an imaginary “Self-Portrait,” actually painted by a 19th century artist). I would have thought Simon & Schuster could come up with something more imaginative. More importantly, the book tries to encompass the vast scale of da Vinci’s world in a single volume, and for that Isaacson deserves kudos. He also writes in a very accessible, almost folksy style, which was the key to the success of his books about Jobs and Einstein, who were equally elusive characters.
The problem is, however, that for all its grand panorama, this book doesn’t tell us anything new or groundbreaking. In terms of scope, he follows closely in the footsteps of two other Leonardo biographers, notably Charles Nicholl’s highly acclaimed Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind (Penguin, 2004) as well as Leonardo: The Artist and the Man by the French essayist Serge Bramly (Penguin 1995). That’s fine if you want a general introduction to the vast range of ideas that occupied Leonardo, but not if you expect to find an up-to-date volume summarizing all of the discoveries and insights that art historians have produced over the last few years.
Take, for example, his chapter on Leonardo’s decision in 1482 to leave his native Florence — the very cradle of the Renaissance — for the decidedly more provincial city of Milan, ruled by an upstart duke named Ludovico Sforza. Amazingly, Isaacson still maintains that Leonardo left for Milan as part of a “diplomatic mission” on behalf of Lorenzo de Medici, the enlightened connoisseur-ruler of Florence. This idea, long since debunked in scholarly circles, is based on a paean published in 1540 by an anonymous author known as the Anonimo Gaddiano. You see, the 1540’s was a time when Leonardo’s mystique continued to spread, and people began wondering why Leonardo had left Florence to begin with. Was Lorenzo de Medici not known for having a nose for budding creative talent? If so, why did he not take young Leonardo under his wing, as he would with Michelangelo? Why did he allow Florence’s greatest prodigy to slip from his grasp?
This is when the Anonimo (who actually may be Bernardo Vecchietti, a key official at the Medici court of Duke Cosimo I) decided that some major PR was in order. The Medici were once again in charge in Florence, after a long hiatus, but this time they had taken the city-state by force, rather than through the ballot box. Ergo, Medici propaganda was the order of the day. And as part of that program, the Anonimo concocted the story that “in the days of (Leonardo’s) youth he was admitted to the company of Il Magnifico, who paid him an allowance and had him work in the garden of Piazza San Marco.” Only one problem: the garden of the Piazza San Marco didn’t exist until 1480, when Leonardo was already 28 years old, and hardly a “youth.” The whole story is simply a fabrication.
The Anonimo also manufactured the fable that Lorenzo so loved Leonardo that it was with his blessing — as part of a diplomatic mission on behalf of the Medici government — that Leonardo had set out for Milan. Why that “mission” would last nearly twenty years remains, of course, unexplained.
The real reason why Leonardo turned his back on Florence is more prosaic. Leonardo never enjoyed the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, for the simple reason that he was uneducated and unlettered. For Lorenzo, who considered himself the leading intellectual of his day, such an unsophisticated artist who had yet to produce anything of merit was not worthy of his attention. Instead, as we argue in Young Leonardo, what prompted da Vinci to leave Florence for Milan was his inability to penetrate the clannish circles of Medici patronage, which was exacerbated by the order from the Augustinian monks to stop working on the Adoration of the Magi. But that’s a story for another day!
