Biographer Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci, which became a bestseller when it was published last year, had many good things to recommend it, although Isaacson sometimes seemed intent on domesticating the wild genius of his subject by depicting it in a series of tame, teachable moments. That sensibility culminated in a closing section called “Learning from Leonardo” that attempted to distill the enigmatic legacy of perhaps the world’s most famous artist into what read like a PowerPoint slide from a motivational speaker. “Be curious, restlessly curious,” Isaacson intoned, channeling the great Renaissance painter and inventor. “Seek knowledge for its own sake. . . . Retain a childlike sense of wonder.”
There is surely nothing wrong with embracing such ideals, but Isaacson’s tutorial tack suggested a reluctance to let his readers draw their own conclusions about his subject’s life and work. It sometimes felt, as I have noted elsewhere, as if Isaacson was using Leonardo as a stand-in for Dale Carnegie.
Leonardo da Vinci is already as much a brand as a historical figure. His paintings have been so commodified and reflexively revered that it’s difficult to see them with fresh eyes.
Whatever its drawbacks, Isaacson’s approach proved commercially shrewd. His Leonardo is being adapted as a screen project with Leonardo DiCaprio, who was named after the artist, in the starring role. The screenplay is reportedly being written by John Logan, whose writing credits include a couple of James Bond movies. one can already imagine the marketing bonanza as the movie and its related merchandise make Leonardo (1452-1519) into a hot Hollywood commodity.
Isaacson’s packaging of Leonardo as a self-help guru points to a broader challenge in apprehending his art. For generations, Leonardo’s paintings have been so commodified and reflexively revered that it’s difficult to see them with fresh eyes.
Perhaps no one is more aware of the problem than Martin Kemp, an emeritus professor of art at Oxford and an expert on Leonardo’s work. Kemp explains why pilgrims to the Louvre aren’t always—or even usually—overwhelmed by their up-close meeting with the Mona Lisa, noting that its curation works against any real sense of intimacy with the masterpiece. The painting’s presence within a glass case sets it at a cold remove from the visitors who file past in a posture of perfunctory homage, the experience often a dry exercise in bucket-list tourism.
In Living with Leonardo: Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World, a memoir of his years studying the artist, Kemp recalls getting a better look at the Mona Lisa because of his special role as an expert. “Meeting Lisa outside her prison is an incredible privilege,” he tells readers. “The framed picture first has to emerge from its specially constructed, alarmed and air-conditioned closet, with its viewing window of specially toughened glass. The frame is laid face down on a table. The wooden panel is removed with tender care, and lifted clear of the glass. It is carried gingerly to an easel by the staff charged with handling it, and firmly clamped into place.”
If Kemp’s detailed account of the Mona Lisa’s undressing reads like a seduction, the effect is surely intentional. one of the reasons for the painting’s fame, he suggests, is its underlying sensuality. It evokes in us a “sense of presence” that is “truly uncanny,” he writes of seeing the Mona Lisa unboxed. “It is alive. The sitter seems to respond to us no less than we respond to her. Through the insistent cracks, grimy varnish and splotchy retouching, her teasing glance and inviting smile invade our space with astonishing vibrancy.”
But Kemp argues that along with the physical barriers distancing most viewers from Mona Lisa, cultural barriers present their own obstacles:
Whatever our reaction, we come to the picture via a dense haze of popular manifestations: advertisements, parodies, cartoons, souvenir mugs, fridge magnets, T-shirts, bikini bottoms, pornographic subversions, and millions of reproductions in every kind of printed and electronic medium. I have accumulated, mainly by gift, an unsystematic collection of Mona Lisa paraphernalia. My personal assistant, Judd, recently gave me a pair of Mona Lisa socks, which seem to go down well at the start of talks.
Despite being reproduced as routinely as one of Warhol’s soup cans, the painting can still, incredibly, convey an air of mystery. Kemp sees that as the painting’s abiding appeal. We think we know Mona Lisa, but she teasingly reminds us that we really don’t. She’s alternately familiar and aloof, which is, Kemp concludes, a perfect ｅxpression of the period in which Leonardo worked. “The overall presentation—the lady is present before our eyes, yet for all her apparent reaction to us, she remains elusive—is profoundly consistent with the characterization of idealized devotion in Italian sonnets,” he writes. “Renaissance poets’ tormented love was not destined to be requited.”
The subtitle of Kemp’s book mentions insanity, a reference to what he calls “Leonardo loonies”—a subculture of obsessives who create elaborate, unsubstantiated theories to explain the master’s pictures.
That element of intrigue informed the plot of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s fictional thriller. “Would The Michelangelo Code have sold anything like as well?” Kemp asks, assuming that the answer is self-evident.
Citing one of the more fanciful speculations about the painting, Kemp notes that “it has been claimed that Leonardo himself posed for the Mona Lisa in drag.” If Leonardo didn’t cross-dress to create his most beloved image, the kooky notion that he is Mona Lisa, as with most myths, points to a larger truth: Like the lady herself, he can first seem vividly close to us, and yet just out of reach.
Leonardo left behind some 7,200 pages of notebooks, ostensibly an exhaustive ｅxpression of self-disclosure. They are famous, of course, for their visionary conceptions of tanks, flying machines, and other gadgets far ahead of their time. But Leonardo’s recorded thoughts are full of runic obscurities, creating a paper trail more riddling than revelatory.
His Tuscan origins are vague, as are other basic biographical details. He probably speaks most directly to us in his paintings, which is why Antonio Forcellino, an Italian authority on Renaissance art, is such a promising Leonardo biographer. His Leonardo: A Restless Genius, first published in Italy in 2016, is now available in an English translation by Lucinda Byatt.
Forcellino opens his narrative in Milan in 1490 at a grand matrimonial feast—the highlight of which is a mechanical tableau representing the movement of the planets. It was the handiwork of 37-year-old Leonardo, who was, long before the birth of Hollywood, celebrated as a special-effects artist. “The man responsible smiled quietly, satisfied at the astonishment he had kindled among guests of all ranks and from all parts,” Forcellino writes.
Leonardo lives in popular imagination as a mad scribbler dashing off visions of the future in the candlelit solitude of a table littered with paper. In beginning his biography at a party, Forcellino usefully underscores the degree to which Leonardo thrived as a part of a larger creative community. In other ways, the book is bracingly counterintuitive. Much is made, for example, of Leonardo’s forward-thinking sensibility. But Forcellino concludes that in many of his ideas, the artist was more a medievalist than a modern, as in his view of “a world where everything was the mirror of something else, and thus the human body was the mirror of the body of the cosmos. . . . Despite his extraordinary intuitions . . . Leonardo was not the new man but, if anything, the last of the old men.”
And while the Old World endures in our common understanding as a settled place, Forcellino points out that Leonardo’s childhood village of Vinci “lay on the edge of the wooded ravines of the foothills to the Tuscan Apennines, where farmed countryside gave way to large areas of wilderness.”
That is why, one gathers, Leonardo’s paintings are far from settled, too. Mona Lisa, Isaacson deftly observed, seems to be in motion, as if she has just turned to see us. The river behind her evokes a restless world, too. And The Last Supper, with its furrowed brows and anguished asides, speaks of a world touched by the divine but nevertheless painfully unresolved.
Leonardo’s genius defies easy summary. His detailed grasp of anatomy made the people in his pictures compellingly authentic, but they’re most memorable, perhaps, for their psychological reality. Mona Lisa’s smile, touched by a wry ambivalence, suggests a casual gesture, not a formal pose.
Leonardo appears to have been unhappy with his handiwork, periodically refining the painting, started in 1503, until shortly before his death. Maybe that’s the biggest reason Leonardo lives so durably in the culture some five centuries after his death. He clearly saw himself—and, by extension, us—as an eternal work in progress.