Everything you need to know about Leonardo da Vinci is contained in the work he did in the 1480s and 1490s for Ludovico Sforza — Ludovico il Moro, the Duke of Milan.
To call Ludovico a mercurial man is to employ far too weak a word. Ludovico was vacillating, spasmodic, and two-faced, a bipolar figure if there ever was one. A leading patron of the arts, the “arbiter of Italy,” according to Niccolo Machiavelli’s friend, Francesco Guicciardini, he was politically ambitious enough to raise an army and steal the duchy of Milan, and possibly to poison his nephew — all while prone to fits of fearfulness, self-destructive indecision, and depression. When Leonardo was sent to him by Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1482, Ludovico decided to employ the 30-year-old polymath as his court’s counselor on “beauty and elegance, especially pageantry.”
And it’s in this capacity that Leonardo, a true genius, keep in mind, with an artistic gift for the ages, busily stage-managed state weddings and diplomatic welcome ceremonies. The theatrical productions included his backdrops, costumes, moveable sets, and mechanical stage devices. All of these were abandoned after use. None of them survives.
Well, yes, there is more to know about da Vinci. You probably have to be aware of the surviving stuff as well: the Virgin of the Rocks painting in the Louvre; the famous mural of The Last Supper; the even more famous Mona Lisa, also in the Louvre; the small number of paintings, as few as eight, no more than 20, universally acknowledged to be by the man.
For that matter, you should have seen the endlessly reproduced Vitruvian Man sketch of perfect human proportions and a handful of other drawings. And you need to know about the existence of his notebooks — around 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, surviving in various manuscripts, which shed genius like the trees shed pollen: sketches of plants and war machines with snippets of scientific speculation and engineering ideas set in the margins. Scattered through the pages are bits of acceptable but uninspired Italian poetry — Leonardo was no Petrarch — and snippets of mild Neoplatonist philosophy — Leonardo was no Ficino.
Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life, a new book by Stephen Campbell, reproduces one of those notebook pages: a single page with notes on the way that water flows, a drawing of a vase adapted into a siphon, and a sketch of a human couple embracing — along with a picture of the valves of the heart, an Alpine landscape, and a figure of a man’s leg. On the back are more drawings of siphons, next to studies of men delivering blows and sounding a horn. And because it’s Leonardo, and there was some blank space on the page, there are also notes on building a canal system and a set of mathematical calculations. His mind flew from thought to thought like a murmuration of birds, swerving in fanciful curves across a sunlit sky.
All these famous bits of Leonardo don’t add up to an explanation of the man, however. We simply don’t have enough information to provide what a modern reader expects from a biography. Although, to be fair, except for a few cases of detailed autobiographical accounts — St. Augustine’s Confessions in the fourth century, say, or Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography in the 16th — we lack that kind of information for everyone who lived before 1700.
But even after granting the expected paucity of known facts about Leonardo, he remains a deeply mysterious man. The edges of his life are too vague in comparison to the lives of his younger contemporaries, Raphael and Michelangelo. And it is the lost ephemeral work, those pageants in Milan mentioned by Renaissance chroniclers, that reveals the mystery most clearly. Or, at least, it reveals the existence of the mystery.
We like to think of great artists in ways the 19th century taught us to — as, for example, world-bestriding geniuses who create the museum art that gives us meaning in a world otherwise devoid of meaning. But the truth is that Leonardo, that Milanese pageant designer, will never fit into modern categories — however much Walter Pater wanted to see him so in his influential Victorian account. Leonardo’s Renaissance life remains stubbornly alien and resolutely unmodern. Even for a Renaissance figure, the man took his own way, swooping through an eccentric life on eccentric wings.
This mystery is the serious point of Campbell’s book. An art professor at Johns Hopkins, Campbell takes “Leonardo’s resistance to becoming a subject of biography” as the starting point of his biography. He adds to his title, Leonardo da Vinci, the subtitle An Untraceable Life, just to be sure we get the idea.
What seems to have prompted this unlikely project are the past 20 or 30 years of the Leonardo industry — the artwork, such as The Last Supper, now so over-restored that most of it is fake, and the people busily using Leonardo to confirm their comfortable present sociopolitics: “He was gay!” “He was a vegetarian!” “He was an agnostic!” What Campbell sees, and the reason we should celebrate his antibiography biography, is that if you have a cubbyhole in which to put him, da Vinci won’t fit.
Scholars will bristle at some of Campbell’s judgment: his defense of St. John the Baptist, for example, a painting typically, and probably rightly, maligned. And like all works that are essentially social criticism, scorn poured on the foibles of a particular moment, the book will have a relatively short shelf-life. Campbell has bits and pieces of some economic theory in the back of his head, a less-than-coherent view of late capitalism as combining mass entertainment, the media, and the art market into a “construct of commercial interests” that has somehow betrayed true scholarship and aesthetics — as though modern scholarship and aesthetics were forced into prostitution instead of rushing headlong to the bordello, all by themselves.
Still, Campbell’s Leonardo da Vinci reminds us of the lies and self-congratulations we employ to create useful history, making historical figures serve our current ideas. The author, at his prickliest, quotes a passage from Walter Isaacson’s 2017 bestselling book on the artist: “We have so much to learn from Leonardo. His ability to combine art, science, technology, the humanities, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creation.” And to his credit, the Hopkins professor is willing to call out the unctuous piety that makes the reader’s skin crawl. Whatever our Renaissance figure is, he ain’t this, thank God.
Joseph Bottum is a writer in the Black Hills and co-founder of the daily poetry newsletter, Poems Ancient and Modern.
