Lofty Genius in Pink and Purple

Leonardo da Vinci
by Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster, 2017, 624 pages, $49.99
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Who has $450 million to spend on one painting? That’s what an anonymous bidder paid at Christie’s for perhaps the last Leonardo da Vinci painting out of captivity in November last year. Called Salvator Mundi, it had languished in a Swiss bank vault for years before a magnificent restoration job by a leading New York restorer. It was the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction.

The leading experts on Leonardo have come down in favour of declaring it genuine, so it becomes one of only about fifteen paintings accepted as being by Leonardo. Can you imagine what the Mona Lisa would now bring?

At about the time Salvator Mundi reached the market, the latest biography of Leonardo was published in New York. Professor Walter Isaacson has produced a doorstopper to add to the voluminous literature on Leonardo. Over 500 pages (with thirty-five pages of footnotes and an irritating index) this is a highly readable magnum opus from a writer who has already produced biographies of Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger.

Isaacson says he chose Leonardo because “he is the ultimate example of the main theme of my previous biographies: how the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius”. Yet he is careful to remind us that Leonardo was very human, that his achievements were “wrought by his own will and ambition”. Consequently he lists at the end twenty separate things we can learn from him and seek to put into practice. I have to say that most of them are pretty platitudinous.

Isaacson comes from a period as editor of Time magazine so the DIY material will not be a great surprise. One would also expect the book to be broken up into manageable chapters, and indeed it is. And the illustrations are many and superb. Isaacson is University Professor of History at Tulane University but this is no academic treatise. It is instead high-quality journalism. He is an educator and sometimes he uses colloquialisms which do not work and somewhat breathless language, but the story flows cogently and cohesively. His accounts of the discovery and authenticating of La Bella Principessa and Salvator Mundi are as exciting as a detective story.

The book is, however, no lightweight effort. Isaacson has worked exhaustively through Leonardo’s voluminous surviving notebooks (7200 jumbled pages) and much of the recent scholarship in the area.

Isaacson follows Leonardo’s life chronologically for the most part. But in a sense the book is built around the works of art for which we remember him (although Isaacson does not always identify their current location) coming to a climax with the Mona Lisa. And he deals with many of the facts we are sure of, others we question, and the morass of controversy. He also offers a great deal about Leonardo’s extraordinary versatility, his uniqueness, his scientific investigations and his relentless curiosity.

With some gaps and questions Leonardo’s life is mostly now known. He was born in 1452, the illegitimate son of a prominent Florentine notary and a country girl. He was prevented from becoming a notary himself by his bastardy—something for which we might give heartfelt thanks. Numerous other famous painters and poets of the era were also illegitimate.

He was not rejected by his father but owed more to his grandparents and an uncle for nurture. His mother seems to have faded out of the scene. But Isaacson can tell us (thanks to the recent researches of Martin Kemp and Giuseppe Pallanti) that she was a sixteen-year-old orphan named Caterina Lippi. She subsequently married a local farmer and had little contact with Leonardo after he turned five.

Freud drew a number of conclusions from all that. But Isaacson is pretty sceptical. Nevertheless, the remarkable young man grew up gay, left-handed, a vociferous vegetarian, with a preference for being a loner, probably a heretic and with little formal education. What more do you need to become a classic outsider?

There are a few surprises. For example, how do we envisage Leonardo da Vinci? Most of us think of Leonardo da Vinci as an elderly man of melancholy mien. That is no doubt because of the proliferation of reproductions of the drawing in Turin which is traditionally thought to be a self-portrait. Not the least of Walter Isaacson’s achievements is to create a completely different image. He presents Leonardo as a handsome man of golden curls and fine build. He was charming and gregarious, elegant and generous and gentle, a man of enormous enthusiasms, probably unrivalled gifts and with a taste for snazzy pink and purple clothing. He was also a great lover of the country and animals.

He was apprenticed in Florence in his teens to Andrea del Verrocchio, a renowned goldsmith and painter. Verrocchio was master of all kinds of artistic activity for the Medici, ranging from pageant banners to bronze memorial sculptures. In this workshop Leonardo would have worked with other craftsmen and students to develop his skills. A previous biographer, Giorgio Vasari, tells a story that Verrocchio asked Leonardo to help by painting aspects of an altarpiece depicting a Baptism of Christ. It is said that Verrocchio was so amazed by the beauty of Leonardo’s angel that he never painted again. In a current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (“Leonardo—Discoveries from Verrocchio’s Studio”) various works from Verrocchio’s studio have been gathered to identify sections which were the work of Leonardo. This particular angel is a major focus.

He moved to Milan in 1482 where he spent seventeen years, returned to Florence, then back to Milan for seven years, to Rome for three years, then, at the invitation of King Francis I, to Amboise in France, where he died in 1519.

From an early age Leonardo’s diversity of interests was apparent. His powers of observation were remarkable—for example, his drawings of birds in flight have been confirmed by modern photography. Kenneth Clark called Leonardo “the most relentlessly curious man in history”. He would bail people up in the street and ask them about their jobs and how they did them. Nothing was beyond his interest. And therein lay what some would call the seeds of disaster. He was notorious for his capacity for distraction and perfectionism. Hence hardly any of his paintings are finished!

Is the Mona Lisa finished? We shall never know. It never reached the person who commissioned it. Leonardo kept it with him until he died. He was worse than Degas at constantly touching up his paintings. He used the thinnest of coatings and they accumulated a marvellous glow. Isaacson thinks he would have gone on refining it forever.

His Last Supper mural in Milan is an appropriate metaphor for his life. Leonardo designed it with incredible ingenuity and symbolism. But he had no patience with the rapid fresco technique for which the refectory wall was prepared and had chosen to use tempera and the relatively new medium of oil paint which was not appropriate for the prepared wall. He would sometimes sit for hours simply contemplating the wall and at other times rush in to apply a few brush strokes and disappear. When summoned by Duke Ludovico Sforza to explain himself Leonardo said: “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” Somehow he got away with it. Pope Leo X said of him many years later: “Alas, this man will never get anything done, for he is thinking about the end before he begins.”

Not long after his brilliant conception was completed—perhaps the second-most famous painting in the world after the Mona Lisa—it began to flake, and has been a nightmare to conservators ever since.

Kenneth Clark thought the figures in the Last Supper “frozen”. Isaacson disagrees: “It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated.” Isaacson also handles the biblical background to the event with ease.

So what did Leonardo do with himself when distracted from his art?

He spent vast amounts of time and energy—no doubt thoroughly enjoying himself—exploring wave motion in hair, wind and water. And in flight, optics, geology, mathematics, botany, astronomy, biology and human and animal anatomy. He designed the first helicopter, tank, bicycle, submarine, odometer, plane and so on. Sadly none of them were ever built. Nor were any of his elaborate fortifications or weapons. No doubt everyone thought them far-fetched. Isaacson says:

he pursued his scientific inquiries not just to serve his art but out of a joyful instinct to fathom the profound beauties of creation …Together they served his driving passion, which was nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it.

His studies were usually 200 years ahead of his time. In anatomy his understanding of the function of the aortic valve was no less than 450 years ahead of his time.

His studies of water and its movement connected with his delight in the painting of the curls on someone’s head—it was all about the patterns of life in which he delighted.

It is highly likely that once his imagination had developed an idea (usually visual because that was his way of thinking) and he had committed it to paper he was ready to move on to another idea. He always vowed to publish the notebooks where so much of his discoveries were secreted, but never did.

To Leonardo everything was connected. Here Isaacson brings some more illumination. All Leonardo’s researches fed into his paintings. For example, in his anatomical dissection he was determined to discover the muscular control behind the human smile. He was also obsessed with mathematics (especially geometry). Hence it is surprising that Isaacson has not come across the “Goldblatt Thesis”. In the May 1950 issue of the Connoisseur, Dr Maurice H. Goldblatt of Notre Dame University maintained that the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa is the result of a “geometric design employed by Leonardo da Vinci in the construction of all the smiling female faces in his pictures”. Goldblatt says:

He achieved this smile by tilting the line of the mouth on the arc of a circle, the circumference of which just touches the outer corner of both eyes. The arc of another circle precisely twice the diameter of the first circle served to define the outline for the top of the head of the Mona Lisa.

The other recent theory which Isaacson does not deal with is that propounded in the 2012 book Mona Lisa—Leonardo’s Earlier Version produced by the Mona Lisa Foundation in Zurich, which suggests that the picture known today as the Isleworth Madonna is the first of two Mona Lisas painted by Leonardo and was delivered to the merchant who commissioned it. Isaacson believes it is simply an excellent copy. Of course it would be impossible in any one volume to consider all theories on a picture which has led to the creation of a thousand theses. Perhaps he is suspicious of a commercial motive behind the Mona Lisa Foundation.

I sense that Isaacson is more interested in, or feels more at home with, Leonardo’s scientific and engineering work than his art. He goes into magnificent detail describing his inventions and illustrating pages from the notebooks which describe his creations—or his fantasies. It seems that Leonardo had the makings of a great educator. He devised the first cutaway illustrations of machines—something dear to the heart of Time-Life.

It seems that Leonardo was more interested in how things work than in exercising his painterly gifts. In a job application he wrote to Ludovico Sforza, subsequently Duke of Milan, he listed ten areas in which he had expertise, all of which related to engineering and warfare. Only then did he say: “Also, I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze and clay. Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible, as well as any other man, whosoever he may be.”

When he was pursued by prominent patrons like Isabella d’Este, her confessor reported: “In truth, his mathematical experiments have absorbed his thoughts so entirely that he cannot bear the sight of a paintbrush.” In his last hours Leonardo confessed that “he had offended God and mankind by not working at his art as he should have done”.

Leonardo was also an entertainer. He spent most of his time in Milan devising pageants and spectacular ways of aggrandising the upstart Sforza dynasty. This satisfied both his engineering bent and his recurrent fantasies—his notebooks contain hundreds of stories and fables (and practical jokes) which he would no doubt use in his role as raconteur to regale the court. It is surprising that, although he was a brilliant musician and invented and made musical instruments, he left no compositions of his own. A contemporary wrote:

He was a connoisseur and marvellous inventor of all beautiful things, especially in the field of stage performances, and sang masterfully to his own accompaniment on the lyre. When he played the lyre with the bow, he miraculously pleased all princes.

While Leonardo spoke in public debate and subsequently wrote in his Paragone that visual art was superior to poetry, he was no mean poet himself, something which Isaacson fails to mention. Giorgio Vasari says he was the “best improviser of verses of his time”.

Isaacson saves the Mona Lisa until last. It is possible that Isaacson has been caught up a little too uncritically in the romance of the Mona Lisa (and indeed of Leonardo as a person). He says:

What began as a portrait of a silk merchant’s young wife became a quest to portray the complexities of human emotion, made memorable through the mysteries of a hinted smile, and to connect our nature to that of our universe. The landscape of her soul and of nature’s soul are intertwined.

But this is Leonardo’s kind of language and cosmology. In his notebooks he writes:

By the ancients man was termed a lesser world and certainly the use of this name is well-bestowed, because, in that man is composed of water, earth, air and fire, his body is an analogue for the world: just as man has in himself bones, the supports and armature of his flesh, the world has the rocks; just as man has in himself the lake of the blood, in which the lungs increase and decrease during breathing, so the body of the earth has its oceanic seas which likewise increase and decrease every six hours with the breathing of the world; just as in that lake of blood the veins originate, which make ramifications throughout the human body, similarly the oceanic sea fills the body of the earth with infinite veins of water.

It is odd that Leonardo never discovered the circulatory system of blood in the body.

Isaacson is not oblivious to the dark side of Leonardo’s genius. His work on the notebooks has shown him how themes of cataclysmic destruction and deluge consuming earthly life recur in his fantasies and drawings. Leonardo wrote: “I do not know what to say or what to do, for everywhere I seem to find myself swimming head downwards through that mighty throat and remaining buried in that huge belly, in the confusion of death.” His dreams must have been like the visions of Hieronymous Bosch. Isaacson suggests that today he would be on medication—at least for Attention Deficit Disorder. His insecure background and hand-to-mouth existence left him desperate for survival at various points. Only in his final years in France with King Francis I did he find the indulgent patronage for which he had always yearned. He no longer had to live by his wits. Francis gave him the title “First Painter, Engineer, and Architect to the King”. But it was really his company, his intellect and stimulus that the king valued.

Leonardo always had a retinue and at various points maintained a well-populated studio. He did much of his work in a collaborative manner. From such relationships great ideas can flow and be explored. And yet there was a perverse desire for freedom from commitment to others or to projects which did not command his enthusiasm. He wrote:

If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.

But there is little doubt that he changed the face of Italian painting and hence that of the Western world. He moved portraiture from the heraldic flattened profile of Gothic style to the three-dimensional and psychological presentation of a unique human being. Crucial to that contribution was his movement from the severity of linear Florentine portraiture to the shadowed subtleties of the “sfumato” (“cleared like mist”) technique he invented. Leonardo said light and shade should blend “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke”. He achieved this by patiently placing layer after layer of thin paint on the board. So reality and fantasy moved together across hazy borders. Art and science merged—experience and mystery came together.

So many questions remain: among them the question of why in such a high proportion of his surviving work (including the Salvator Mundi, the Last Supper and John the Baptist) a figure points upwards to the heavens. Perhaps Leonardo’s lack of interest in organised religion makes him a very modern man, not without a particular faith of his own. There was no doubt a spiritual component in his awe of the cosmos in flux, even as he later in life doubted the accuracy of his macrocosm/microcosm analogy.

Let Isaacson have the last word:

What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect. His facility for combining observation with fantasy allowed him, like other creative geniuses, to make unexpected leaps that related things seen to things unseen. “Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.”