LEONARDO DA VINCI: The Flights of the Mind
by Charles NichollAllen Lane £25 pp622 LEONARDO
by Martin Kemp
OUP £14.99 pp286
There was almost nothing Leonardo da Vinci didn’t want to know. He wrote himself lists of topics for study, topics that vary from the minute to the tremendous (“Describe the beginning of man, and what causes it within the womb”). He carried a notebook in which he jotted notes or sketches of anything which caught his interest — an unusual design for a dovecote, or the resemblances between eddying water and braided hair. He studied human anatomy, going to the baths on a Saturday to watch naked men, and risked charges of heresy by dissecting corpses. He analysed the movements of water and the flights of birds. And all of this was over and above the exhaustively detailed technical knowledge he required for the prosecution of his multifarious concurrent careers as engineer (both civil and military), architect, set designer, munitions manufacturer, interior decorator, tool-maker, musician and painter. He had intellectual energy and curiosity enough to embrace the entire world of nature as well as the creations of humankind, seeking not only to apprehend the beauty but also to comprehend the workings of both. The sheer volume, as well as the astonishing density of thought and image, of his wonderful notebooks testify to the amplitude of his intellectual interests. There is only one subject about which he appears to have been incurious — himself.
This is troublesome for a biographer. It is fortunate that Charles Nicholl has a talent for writing about subjects elusive to the point of inscrutability. His The Reckoning examined the ultimately insoluble case of Christopher Marlowe’s murder. Even more pertinently, in Somebody Else, Nicholl tackled the fractured life of Rimbaud, whose stubborn reticence provided him with the basis for a haunting study of shifting identity. So now, taking on a man who has left what seems like a record of his every thought but who reveals so little of his self, Nicholl has fashioned a form to suit his subject. Abjuring introspection, Leonardo looks outwards, and so, accordingly, does his biographer.
Nicholl, who lives in Italy, conjures up in meticulous detail the physical reality of Renaissance Florence and Milan. He re-creates the din and flurry of building works that characterise Florence in its expansionist prime. He itemises the minerals used in paint manufacture and deduces from the widespread use of egg white in tempera that artists’ studios must have been full of hens. He pays attention to the sheer hard work involved in making art. Leonardo was extremely fastidious, but Nicholl reminds us that his exquisite works were the product of titanic labours. As a young man (at the points where in a more conventional biography we would be expecting to hear about sexual awakening and first love) he was involved in the hoisting of a 20-ton copper orb onto the apex of Florence’s duomo. He painted beautiful women serenely posed, but he also drew an ordnance factory in which a swarm of contorted men struggle to erect a huge machine. A patron was taken aback when, on receiving his commission, Leonardo began, not to meditate on the sacred subject matter (it was St John the Baptist) or to sketch out the composition, but to experiment with a new formula for fixing the paint. To Leonardo, who believed that the soul could be located exactly at the mid-point of the skull, the material and the mundane were the things that mattered and that, indirectly, gave access to the sublime. Nicholl, accordingly, gives us plenty of them. He describes Leonardo’s clothes (a pink tunic, jauntily knee-length when most of his peers wore theirs long), the rooms he inhabited, the people with whom he surrounded himself.
These latter were almost exclusively young men. That Leonardo was homosexual is now widely accepted. His longest-running relationship was with a beautiful delinquent he named Salai, who entered his household when he was 10 years old. (It is piquant to reflect that the man now so revered might well, were he living now, be imprisoned for child abuse.) There is a drawing of a haughty ringletted youth gazed at by a bald and toothless old man that Nicholl believes to be a portrait of Salai with Leonardo not as he looked (he was only in his thirties at the time) but as he felt, yearning after the boy. By such indirect clues Nicholl approaches an understanding of his subject’s state of mind.
Leonardo composed riddles. One reads, “With merciless blows many little children will be taken from the arms of their mothers and thrown to the ground and then torn to pieces.” The solution is “walnuts” (which were harvested by beating the trees with sticks), but it surely also expresses something more personal. Leonardo was an illegitimate child, and Nicholl persuasively traces a pattern of anxiety and longing throughout his work. He was acutely aware both of natural violence, and of the violence done to nature by humankind. His elusiveness as a biographical subject, Nicholl suggests, is linked to his evasiveness as a man. The “flight” of the subtitle may derive from the verb “to fly” (which Leonardo certainly aspired to do) but also from “to flee”. In December 1502, Cesare Borgia, Leonardo’s employer, had a rebellious captain hacked in half and left lying in the piazza with a butcher’s knife beside him. Leonardo, meanwhile, was making notes on a church bell, “the way it moved and how its clapper was fastened”. As Nicholl remarks, such escapist absorption in things less disturbing than human savagery is both “maddening” and “rather wonderful”.
Leonardo may not want to show himself, but his contemporaries, happily, did. Martin Kemp, to whose previous publications Nicholl several times alludes, argues in his new book (a succinct collection of essays drafted, he tells us, during an 11-day sojourn in the house that once belonged to the family of Mona Lisa) that the famous “self-portrait” of Leonardo as a hairy-browed, bearded sage is no such thing. But there are other representations. Nicholl believes Leonardo to have modelled in his teens for Verrocchio’s boyish David. Kemp’s jacket shows the drawing by Mali, the amanuensis to whom Leonardo left all his manuscripts, and Nicholl has identified another, delightful image of the master, posing as St Jerome in an altar piece by his pupil Giampietrino. It shows him, not as a formidable old sage, but pensive and gracious. According to Vasari, he was exceptionally beautiful and a delightful conversationalist. He was, perhaps, a man easier to love than to know.
HIS RESTLESS IMAGINATION
The “true whiff” of Leonardo, says Charles Nicholl, is to be found in his absorbing notebooks which he seems to have carried with him on his travels. One eyewitness in Milan mentioned “a little book he had always hanging at his belt”, and in 1502 he stopped long enough in Cesena to make a swift sketch captioned, “This is how they carry grapes in Cesena.”
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