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Summary
Summary
For five centuries, Leonardo da Vinci has stood alone as the quintessential Renaissance manÂthe incomparable artist, writer, thinker, and inventor who most powerfully transformed his world. In this dazzling new intimate biography, award-winning author Charles Nicholl creates a portrait of the artist for our timeÂa biography that brings Leonardo to life as a complex man living in a fascinating, dangerous, quickly changing world.Drawing freely on his own original translations of LeonardoÂs notebooks as well as newly discovered contemporary accounts, Nicholl captures the very texture of LeonardoÂs mind and the pungent visceral impressions he transmuted into art. Detail by brilliant detail, Nicholl reconstructs the life and times of the artist, from his troubled childhood as the illegitimate son of an established Tuscan family to his years of apprenticeship in the burgeoning art world of Medici Florence to his unrivaled achievements in a breathtaking array of disciplines and media. Here, too, are compelling new answers to the enduring mysteries of LeonardoÂs sexual orientation, the true identity of the Mona Lisa, and the early experiences that inspired his lifelong obsession with human flight.A writer of irresistible charm and quicksilver imagination, Nicholl takes us from the backstreet artists studios of Florence to the glittering palazzi of the Medici, Sforza, and Borgia families as he pursues the most extravagantly talented and maddeningly elusive artist of all time. The result is a biography of rare grace and penetration.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nicholl aims for the man behind the myth in this penetrating, highly detailed biography, which recognizes da Vinci's "mysterious greatness as an artist, scientist and philosopher" but avoids hagiography (and nearly steers clear of the word "genius"). The illegitimate child of a Tuscan peasant girl and a local notary, da Vinci (1452-1519) was apprenticed as a teen to Florence sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. Nicholl (Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa) conjectures convincingly about Leonardo's early career, though he tends to dwell overlong on technical aspects of Renaissance art production. Leonardo established a Florentine studio in 1477, but it was not until he moved to Milan five years later that he began to produce his iconic works: the painting Virgin of the Rocks, the famous Vitruvian Man drawing. Nicholl chronicles the production of The Last Supper and makes a firm statement about the Mona Lisa's identity. Numerous questions about Leonardo's life remain, unavoidably, unanswered, but Nicholl fills in the gaps with insight into the artist's cultural milieu, offering tidbits about Leonardo's sexuality, the sordid goings-on at the Borgia court and the multifarious fruits of the artist's astonishingly fertile curiosity and imagination. Nicholl's attention to da Vinci's polymathic pursuits, as well as his own translations from the artist's numerous notebooks, are some of this dense but readable volume's most compelling aspects. Illus. Agent, Penguin U.K. (Nov. 22) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
Leonardo da Vinci's life and work have the perennial capacity to excite and inspire those who engage with them. In his own lifetime they had already become the stuff of legends, while no less a figure than the king of France himself had become passionately committed to Leonardo and his oeuvre. Less than 50 years after his death, one of his earliest biographers, Georgio Vasari, attempting to capture Leonardo's greatness, established the tone of imaginative and verbal extravagance which has lastingly set the parameters for all subsequent celebrations of Leonardo's very special genius: "Leonardo was mourned out of measure by all who had known him, for there was none who had done such honour to painting. The splendour of his great beauty could calm the saddest soul, and his words could move the most obdurate mind. His great strength could restrain the most violent fury, and he could bend an iron knocker or a horseshoe as if it were lead. He was liberal to his friends, rich and poor, if they had talent and worth; and indeed as Florence had the greatest of gifts in his birth, so she suffered an infinite loss in his death." How many hundreds of thousands of words have been written since Vasari, trying to convey the extraordinary combination of talents and imaginative brio which made up the mind of this enigmatic man? While the exquisite drawings, diagrams, maps and engineering blueprints, and the handful of achieved paintings have consistently fascinated all who have seen them, the man himself continues to elude us. Leonardo himself would probably have regarded all those words spent on him as a mistake from the outset. Words are a poor resource for capturing complexity, according to Leonardo. Beneath a meticulous drawing of a dissected heart, on one of the many pages of his dazzlingly precise anatomical drawings now in the royal collection at Windsor, Leonardo wrote: "O writer! What words can you find to describe the whole arrangement of the heart as perfectly as is done in this drawing? My advice is not to trouble yourself with words unless you are speaking to the blind." For the visually minded Leonardo, a graphic representation would be the most fitting and precise version to pass down to posterity. Alas, the portrait or self-portrait equivalent of such pen-and-ink precision has not survived for us. Although Charles Nicholl, in one of two new biographies of Leonardo, tries hard to convince us that he has identified early images of the great master among the many thousands of sheets of surviving sketches and drawings by Leonardo and his students, none can with any certainty be proved to be the man himself. The only almost-reliable portraits to come down to us show the great man in old age with long locks and flowing beard - the epitome of the antique sage. There is no bold, suggestive portrait of the man in his prime, no image of him at work as artist or engineer. So, like so many biographers before them, Nicholl and Martin Kemp have sought to capture the elusive essence of Leonardo da Vinci in word-pictures. And like every biographer, each attempt is deeply marked by the particular interests of the author and his age. Where Vasari was inclined to celebrate the outstanding calibre of the work, and to promote its maker as an appropriately commanding figure of a man, 21st-century biographers feel the need to get inside the artist's head, to tap into his emotional and sensual soul - and if possible to turn up some sensational piece of extra-curricular activity to spice up our reading. Professor Kemp is the acknowledged academic expert on Leonardo as artist and scientist. A scientist himself by training, he brings to Leonardo's artistic production - fragmented, diffuse and tantalisingly incomplete as it is - a keen understanding of Leonardo's excavation of the interlocking beauties of structure and form in the natural world, and a strong sense of the way a scientific mind might respond to the challenge of the visual. Kemp is temperamentally in sympathy with Leonardo's urge to impose system and order upon the contingent disorder of nature observed. For him, the most brilliant comments within the corpus of Leonardo's notes are those which aspire to understand an overarching system and a grand plan. Art and engineering are part of a single system of thought: "Every act of looking and drawing was, for Leonardo, an act of analysis, and it was on the basis of these analyses that the human creator can remake the world. Thus the flying machine and the Mona Lisa comparably remake the natural world on nature's own terms, fully obedient to natural causes and effects. One is an artificial 'bird'; the other is an artificial remaking of the visual experience of a person's physical presence." Kemp's Leonardo began life as one of Oxford University Press's witty and succinct "Very Short Introduction" series, and is brief and focused. Each chapter chooses a "grand theme" from Leonardo's life or work, and orchestrates the available information effortlessly around it. In addition to its magisterial text it contains useful reading aids: a timeline of Leonardo's life and a gallery of reproductions of the paintings, to supplement the reproductions of drawings and colour details in the text. Nicholl, by contrast, is a man mesmerised by the minutiae of archival evidence - the shreds of everyday life preserved accidentally for posterity, and from which the biographer-sleuth can piece together a vivid personality and a plausible career. Each shard of writing deciphered from the margins of a manuscript determines a direction for further exploration. His Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind is an expansive volume, dense with footnotes and copiously illustrated with images from the manuscripts. In Nicholl's patient hands, acres of undervalued and unread material are painstakingly unpicked, rewoven, and moulded into an armature which gives coherent shape to the long life of a Renaissance genius. The more than 7,000 surviving pages of Leonardo notebooks are for him a goldmine of clues to follow, theories more or less tentatively proposed, and assertions of "fact" boldly risked. Like all biographers of Leonardo before them, these two authors wrestle with the problem of forming coherence from the rather few, disparate fragments of "fact" which give only shadowy shape to Leonardo's life. From his opening meditation on the single phrase with which Leonardo breaks off a page of geometrical annotations, "because the soup is getting cold", Nicholl proceeds to build a painstakingly constructed edifice of possibilities: "It tells us a great deal: that Leonardo ate a bowl of lukewarm soup on a day in 1518 hardly qualifies as an important piece of biographical data. What seems to make it special is a quality of surprise, of casualness. Into the dry abstractions of his geometrical studies has intruded this moment of simple, daily humanity." Some of these details - particularly regarding Leonardo's childhood, of which we know virtually nothing - verge on the far- fetched. But whether or not one accepts Nicholl's Freudian inferences (some mooted by Freud himself) regarding Leonardo's early life, what the reader gets is a rich, textured feel for the world the fatherless boy inhabited and from which he drew his later inspiration. Nicholl is always careful to warn us if he is adducing evidence from beyond his subject's own life, or risking a guess or a flash of purely personal insight into his much-researched hero's personality. By doing so he charms the reader into trusting him elsewhere. By implication everything else is grounded in the surviving manuscript evidence as examined under the microscope of Nicholls's detective- style scrutiny. The author of The Reckoning - that great speculative biography of Shakespeare's dramatist-competitor, Christopher Marlowe - enjoys himself most when the document he is examining is apparently in code, and its status as evidence uncertain. Indeed, there are moments when the style of argument of The Flights of the Mind closely resembles its fictional cousin, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Both books claim to "uncover the secret behind Mona Lisa's smile". Both ultimately leave that enigma firmly in place. Kemp prefers to remind us that Leonardo's most famous painting ought to be called the "Monna Lisa" (meaning simply, "Madam Lisa") and that the smile is probably a pun on her married name - wife of Mr del Giocondo, Madam Gioconda, "she who smiles". Set these two biographies side by side and you have complementary guides for exploring Leonardo - two 21st-century attempts to make sense of a lasting enigma. Ideally they ought to be read together: Kemp's for the way ideas are effortlessly harnessed to the outlines of Leonardo's life; Nicholls's for the grain and stuff of the richly textured, almost tangible Italian Renaissance world, within which Leonardo moved, which formed the material basis for his ideas, and the currents of whose influence sustained the virtuoso upward flights of his mind. Lisa Jardine's The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London is published by HarperCollins. To order The Flights of the Mind for pounds 23 or Leonardo for pounds 14.24, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-leonardo.1 Leonardo da Vinci's life and work have the perennial capacity to excite and inspire those who engage with them. In his own lifetime they had already become the stuff of legends, while no less a figure than the king of France himself had become passionately committed to Leonardo and his oeuvre. Less than 50 years after his death, one of his earliest biographers, Georgio Vasari, attempting to capture Leonardo's greatness, established the tone of imaginative and verbal extravagance which has lastingly set the parameters for all subsequent celebrations of Leonardo's very special genius: "Leonardo was mourned out of measure by all who had known him, for there was none who had done such honour to painting. The splendour of his great beauty could calm the saddest soul, and his words could move the most obdurate mind. His great strength could restrain the most violent fury, and he could bend an iron knocker or a horseshoe as if it were lead. He was liberal to his friends, rich and poor, if they had talent and worth; and indeed as Florence had the greatest of gifts in his birth, so she suffered an infinite loss in his death." Professor [Martin Kemp] is the acknowledged academic expert on Leonardo as artist and scientist. A scientist himself by training, he brings to Leonardo's artistic production - fragmented, diffuse and tantalisingly incomplete as it is - a keen understanding of Leonardo's excavation of the interlocking beauties of structure and form in the natural world, and a strong sense of the way a scientific mind might respond to the challenge of the visual. Kemp is temperamentally in sympathy with Leonardo's urge to impose system and order upon the contingent disorder of nature observed. For him, the most brilliant comments within the corpus of Leonardo's notes are those which aspire to understand an overarching system and a grand plan. Art and engineering are part of a single system of thought: "Every act of looking and drawing was, for Leonardo, an act of analysis, and it was on the basis of these analyses that the human creator can remake the world. Thus the flying machine and the Mona Lisa comparably remake the natural world on nature's own terms, fully obedient to natural causes and effects. One is an artificial 'bird'; the other is an artificial remaking of the visual experience of a person's physical presence." - Lisa Jardine.
Kirkus Review
The venerable prize-winning Nicholl (Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91, 1999) examines one of the icons of Western culture. For all Leonardo's well-deserved reputation as universal man, Nicholl devotes his opening section to the artist's (illegitimate, to boot) upbringing on a Tuscan farm, demonstrating the way many of Leonardo's future interests and observations derive from this period and from the circumstances of his life (Freud's interpretations are weighed regularly). Copiously researched, and enhanced by the author's residence in Italy and his own observations, particularly, of the Tuscan way of life, the book makes logical deductions from scraps of source material. Nicholl gives us short vignettes, about ten to each of the seven broader sections. In each, he asks questions about Leonardo's life: Why did he leave Florence, in 1481, for 18 years? Why was he impaziente of painting by 1500? He also follows the strings of Leonardo studies--from paintings to notebooks, jokes (dirty and otherwise), subpoenas, studio assistants, cryptic scribbles--and is led to deductions about Leonardo's sexuality (be sure to read to the end), what he was trying to achieve in his paintings, and the question that seems to baffle all who confront Leonardo's career: Why was he so successful if what survives of his work is so fragmentary and unfinished? Particularly fascinating is Nicholl's presentation of the broad context of the era, outlined by one who has penetrated the layers of surviving hints about the culture. We learn about the contents of artists' studios and of probate inventories, census and tax records, and museum curatorial files. Nicholl understands and decodes the shorthand jargon of Renaissance Italian and reminds us of the frequently autobiographical nature of Leonardo's notebook musings. Details are compelling in a long book that defies skimming. More decoding of Leonardo: a beautifully written, masterful biography of the great artist/scientist as person. (Illustrations throughout; plates not seen) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Award-winning biographer Nicholl takes a marvelously fresh and human approach to the fascinating life of Leonardo. Evincing delight in the vicissitudes of scholarly sleuthing and a love of literature, Nicholl, who has a gift for spotting overlooked gems, offers a unique focus on the language in Leonardo's famous notebooks. He is also unusually eloquent in his recognition of the importance of Leonardo's country boyhood and the resulting visual lexicon and ecologically compassionate view of nature (he eventually became a vegetarian) that underlie all of his work, from his finely detailed drawings and paintings to his fascination with flight. Nicholl carefully explicates Leonardo's musicality, habit of inquisitiveness, love of technology, and artistic practices and renowned works. He also happily extracts evidence of Leonardo's affection for various boyfriends, particularly a man whose nickname, Salai, translates as Little Devil, and argues convincingly that Leonardo enjoyed a liaison with one of his beautiful female models. In sum, Nicholl portrays a far more complex and appealing man than the chilly word genius usually suggests. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
