The Cult-Figure Life of Leonardo Da Vinci

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Illustration Credit:   Joost Swarte

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The notion that Leonardo was so weird that he could be from another planet has survived a century of scholarship.

When I was a teen-ager, I wrote a science-fiction story about Leonardo da Vinci. In it, a young art historian becomes fascinated with Leonardo’s otherworldly paintings, with their strange rocky backgrounds, unplaceable landscapes, and enigmatic not-quite-human saints, their single fingers forever pointing strangely upward. To make a long, and rather shamelessly Rod Serlingish, story short, the art historian eventually discovers, in a previously unknown codex, that Leonardo was an alien, that the rocks were the landscape of his native planet, and that the fingers were pointing longingly back home.

Sensing, sadly but with characteristic prescience, that the market in occult stories involving strange codes hidden in Leonardo’s works was essentially nil, I left the story unfinished; just recently, a new pair of Leonardo books brought it to mind. The basic notion—that Leonardo is so weird that he might as well be from another planet—turns out to be hardy enough to have survived even a century of scholarship aimed at replacing romantic, otherworldly Leonardo with historical Leonardo, a man of his time. Most one-of-a-kind artists turn out, after study, to be, in another sense, merely one of a kind. William Blake, if not exactly normal, was, after Robert Rosenblum placed him with his friends Fuseli and Flaxman, more obviously part of a group, one of many lineloving, mystical neoclassicists. Bosch may still look strange to us, but, now that art historians have explained that some of his Spanish patrons thought his nightmares were funny, or even pious, we at least understand how they were originally received.

Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it. He put wings on pet lizards and called them dragons; scribbled pyramidal parachutes in the margins of manuscripts which, more than five hundred years later, turn out to work perfectly; dashed off a letter to the Ottoman sultan offering to design a bridge that would span the Golden Horn (and the bridge he sketched, built elsewhere a few years ago, in a scaled-down version, not only is perfectly engineered but anticipates the look of Eero Saarinen’s T.W.A. terminal). He drew the Deluge, imagined the modern mortar, and fixed a half smile in the world’s imagination, and there was no one else around doing anything like it. This keeps him a cult figure; a new series of books promises to teach you “How to Think Like Leonardo”—though, given that what his style of thinking got him was the inability to finish almost a single piece of work, learning how not to think like him might be more useful—and, of course, there is the Leonardo whose code is at the center of the best-selling thriller.

Two new and serious studies attempt the work of making Leonardo earthbound again. “Leonardo” (Oxford; $26), by the Oxford art-history professor Martin Kemp, is a summary of a life’s research; “Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind” (Viking; $32.95), by the biographer and historian Charles Nicholl, is a popular account, dense with social history and rational, high-hearted speculation. The simultaneous appearance of the books doubtless created two anxious publishers, but they complement each other almost perfectly: Kemp’s is Leonardo seen from the inside out, Nicholl’s from the outside in. Kemp explains Leonardo’s principles of design and his theory of the world from an intense knowledge of his mind and drawings; Nicholl shows where his ideas came from and who paid to subsidize them, through a broad rendering of his life and times.

Kemp’s book is less a proper biography—he offers no extended account of Leonardo’s illegitimate birth to a peasant’s daughter, his apprenticeship in Florence to the sculptor Verrocchio, or his subsequent lifelong wanderings in the courts of Milan and France—than a series of intense, learned meditations on Leonardesque themes. Setting aside the wow! factor of Leonardo’s discoveries and anticipations, Kemp tries to define what Leonardo thought he was doing, and why. He argues, convincingly, that Leonardo was constantly searching for a universal system of proportion—not merely a system of aesthetic proportion, like the famous Golden Mean, but a system of proportion that would explain, as Newton’s inverse-square rule of gravity did, two centuries later, the fundamental workings of forces. “Leonardo was the first to tie the artist’s notion of proportional beauty into the wider setting of the proportional action of all the powers of nature,” Kemp writes. Leonardo accepted the Aristotelian theory that all motion begins with an impetus. (The fact that, as Galileo and Newton showed, objects would go on moving forever if something didn’t stop them remains counter-intuitive, even today.) But Leonardo swiftly saw that the theory must be wrong: things didn’t go far enough fast enough. He never resolved this problem, Kemp thinks, because he didn’t have the math for it, but he never stopped searching for a resolution.

His thought processes in this search were, crucially, visual, not mathematical. He had the gift, quite distinct from numeric reasoning, of seeing abstract form; he would have aced the sections on standardized tests asking the student to make a mental rotation of a cube or a tetrahedron. His imagination was geometric in the sense that he thought that a small vocabulary of recurring shapes was produced whenever an impetus—the force that drives water forward in a deluge, that drives the arrow from the crossbow—was deflected by the natural fields of air and earth and water.

This constant search for basic, rhyming, organic form meant that when he looked at a heart blossoming into its network of veins he saw, and sketched alongside it, a seed germinating into shoots; studying the curls on a beautiful woman’s head he thought in terms of the swirling motion of a turbulent flow of water (“Note the motion of the surface of water, which conforms to that of the hair,” he wrote, in his looking-glass script); and, studying the swirling tendrils of a sea anemone, he turns them into something as dressed up and willed as a fashionable woman’s hairdo. He even doodled churches that resembled the forms of shells and flowers. (If he seems to anticipate any modern science, it is D’Arcy Thompson’s discovery of basic algorithms of biological structure in “On Growth and Form.”)

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Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. During his tenure at the magazine, he has written fiction, humor, criticism, book reviews, personal essays, Profiles, and reported pieces from abroad. He was the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995 and the Paris correspondent from 1995 to 2000. From 2000 to 2005, he wrote a journal about New York life. His books, ranging from essay collections about Paris and food to children’s novels, include “Paris to the Moon,” “The King in the Window,” “Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York,” “Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life,” “The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food,” “Winter: Five Windows on the Season,” “At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York,” “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism,” and “The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery.” Gopnik has won three National Magazine Awards, for essays and for criticism, and also the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March of 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2021 he was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur. He lectures widely, and, in 2011, delivered the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s fiftieth-anniversary Massey Lecture. His musical, “Our Table,” opened in 2017, at the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven, and his one-man storytelling show, “The Gates,” played at the Public Theatre in New York.

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