Visual ArtsThe name Leonardo da Vinci is virtually synonymous with genius. And it is no small part of Charles Nicholl's achievement that his Leonardo, though a genius, is thoroughly and convincingly human, likeable and, in many important respects, an exemplary person. This is all the more striking because, though an immense amount of documentation exists in relation to Leonardo, not least his own voluminous notebooks, in many crucial respects he remains unknown and curiously elusive.
Nicholl's Leonardo has an unbridled curiosity about the world. He observes tirelessly, tries to deduce causes from effects, looks for order in nature and applies natural order to his own engineering projects. Perhaps we think of a genius as someone who knows, someone who is certain about things, whereas Leonardo's genius is down to the fact of his open curiosity. He looks to the evidence and tries to understand rather than set out to stamp a pattern on the world.
Born in provincial Tuscany in 1452, he was the illegitimate child of a notary. He was apprenticed to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence, and by the time he was 25 had established his own workshop. But he didn't forge effective ties with patrons in Florence and, when he quit the city in the 1480s, leaving a major commission unfinished, it marked the beginning of a pattern. Together with other intriguing aspects of his character, his penchant for leaving projects uncompleted attracted the attention of Freud and other psychoanalytical observers.
Of course, this is not to say that Leonardo completed nothing. His prolific notebooks teem with observations, ideas and proposals for works and devices, the vast majority of which did not see the light of day, at least in his lifetime. But while his completed works were few enough in relative terms, they have proved to be enormously important. No mean feat, after all, to have painted what remains the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa. In fact, every single major piece of Leonardo's finished work made a significant, indelible impact, and his unrealised plans and outlines continue to provide speculative material for engineers and artists today.
While in Verrocchio's workshop, he was publicly charged with sodomy, a potentially serious charge at the time. Nicholl concludes that he was homosexual. There is considerable evidence that this was the case, though some scholars would like to preserve a view of him as a celibate aesthete - admittedly with a certain level of justification, given that he was notably fastidious and more than once expressed distaste for the whole business of physical love. But he became romantically attached to several young men and was not averse to earthy, bawdy humour. There is also circumstantial evidence that, later in his life, he may have had a physical relationship with at least one woman, La Cremona, who modelled for a number of paintings.
Certainly Leonardo was anything but an unworldly dreamer. He had a reputation for dressing smartly and expensively. At one point Nicholl posits the tantalising possibility of him arriving in Rome sporting a prototypical pair of sunglasses - "Leonardo in shades", the very picture of Renaissance cool. He managed a busy, thriving workshop, ran a household and had a keen sense of his own worth. He was not slow about advertising his abilities, on occasion well before they were proven. And he was jealous of his own position, looking askance at Michelangelo, for example, suggesting that the best location for the monumental David was off in a corner where it wouldn't get in the way, and disparaging the bodies of his beefcake nudes as "sacks of walnuts". In the inherently unstable political framework of Renaissance Italy, with its city states, its mercenary armies and predatory interlopers, its shifting networks of alliances and spheres of influence, Leonardo found a powerful patron in Ludovico Sforza, "The Moor", who ruled Milan. While he applied himself to specific painting and sculptural commissions, Leonardo's brief was much wider than that. He can best be described as a general consultant whose talents might be applied to anything from architectural problems or civil engineering projects to designing and planning military fortifications and weaponry.
It remains unclear how many of these schemes were realised. What is clear, though, is that he devoted a great deal of time and energy to designing extravagant parties and festivities for his patron, not something one would automatically associate with him.
Throughout, he also followed his own curiosity in addressing a huge range of subjects, mingling artistic and scientific method in ground-breaking explorations of human anatomy, botany, mechanics, fluid dynamics and various other areas of exploration.
Underlying the sheer diversity of his observations, Martin Kemp argues, was the desire to explain that diversity and complexity in terms of underlying geometric laws, a prototypical Theory of Everything.
Kemp's book is perplexing. A renowned Leonardo expert, he has managed to produce a text that never really feels like a book in itself, reading more like a disjointed commentary. It's not uninformative, but it's curiously uninvolving and fragmentary.
Leonardo's 20 years or so in Milan with Ludovico were enormously productive, but then political developments meant that he had to quit the city. Now a man in demand, a restless period saw him travel on several little-documented journeys, until he found another strong patron, Cesare Borgia, in Florence, before finding his way back to Milan in 1506, to design a villa and garden for Charles d'Amboise. He went on to serve French interests in general in northern Italy and, when their influence faded, worked for the Medicis in Rome. Eventually he moved to France where, in 1519, he died.
Nicholl's account of his final years is desperately sad. The artist clearly becomes increasingly aware of the dwindling amount of time left to him, the limitations of his energy. He seems to have suffered a stroke that severely impaired his mobility and ability to work. Whereas throughout his life he cheerfully outlined plans for multi-volume works on various areas of inquiry that interested him, now, when he starts to assess the writings he has amassed he realises that even the initial task of organising his notes is impossibly ambitious. In a moment of melancholy realisation he writes in one of his notebooks: "When I thought I was learning to live I was also learning to die."
Aidan Dunne is Art Critic of The Irish Times
Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind By Charles Nicholl Penguin/Allen Lane, 623pp. £25
Leonardo By Martin Kemp Oxford University Press, 286pp. £14.99
