Leonardo Da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind

Famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."

The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found. Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said (from Wikipedia): "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."

It is a fact that, at the mention of Leonardo da Vinci, most of us reverently think of an old, bearded man, an archetypal and distant figure of polymathic genius. How arresting, then, to learn in this impressively researched biography that he was athletic and "extraordinarily beautiful," ringlets falling down his back, nattily dressed, a bit of a charmer. In fact, the famously well-proportioned Vitruvian Man may be in part a self-portrait.

Kindhearted and averse to conflict - even when publicly goaded by his rival Michelangelo - he harboured "the sense of himself as an outsider: illegitimate, unlettered, sexually illicit." A moving record of his life (he died at 67, highly lauded by his contemporaries), LEONARDO DA VINCI: FLIGHTS OF THE MIND documents how the interplay of loneliness and drive, and of artistic and scientific genius, allowed for the creation of masterpieces often imbued with "an autumnal suffusion of transience and regret" - what da Vinci himself called "the perspective of loss."

It is a testament to the graceful writing and sheer narrative likability of Charles Nicholl that this capacious text - which includes substantial end notes, lovely black-and-white illustrations and 30 colour plates - reads as easily as it does. An award-winning writer of 11 previous books of history, travel and biography, Nicholl retranslates many of da Vinci's mirrorscript writings. He approaches his subject with a contagious excitement while noting the ultimate inscrutability of many areas of the past. "It is a biographer's job to be sceptical more often than romantic," he acknowledges, yet he does a superior job of fleshing out someone who will essentially remain a mystery but who has left his soul behind with his legacy of ideas and inventions.

Nicholl's archaeological attention to detail opens up da Vinci's world for the reader. We know, for instance, the street names and what sorts of shops surrounded Verrocchio's studio, which books our subject had in his library, how much money went to household expenses on a given Saturday in 1504 - for a trip to the barber and another to the market for eggs, bread, partridge.

But it is in the consideration of da Vinci's creative processes that this history is most riveting. We learn of cartooning and underpaintings, we see tantalizing sketches of lost work, we read da Vinci's notes on the exact positions and busywork of each disciple in The Last Supper: "Another who has turned, holding a knife in his hand, knocks over a glass on the table." A study exists of the muscles surrounding the lips, one experimental drawing identical to that of the most well-known of enigmatic smiles.

Nicholl reflects on artwork beautifully and concisely, describing the portraits done during the Milan years, for example, as "soothing, velvety backgrounds against which the foreground figures seem spotlit, as if performing in some subtle metaphorical cabaret." A novice monk witnessed da Vinci at work on The Last Supper and noted how he could sometimes paint all day without food or drink, while at other times he would stand before the wall for hours without making a mark. "That massive sweep of visual narrative ... is made up of thousands of tiny brush-strokes, thousands of microscopic decisions," Nicholl writes. "The familiarity of a world-famous painting makes it seem somehow inevitable - how could it be other than it is? - but every inch has been fought for."

The evolutionary nature of da Vinci's art is evident in the intriguing history of the Mona Lisa, da Vinci's "long-term companion," which he worked on for four years and was still holding on to nine years later. What makes the story even more compelling is that at the same time he painted this legendary portrait he was engaged in configuring an enormous canal project meant to divert the course of the Arno River. Beyond artist and sculptor, da Vinci was an engineer, an inventor of flying machines, an architect, a mathematician, a cartographer, a theatrical designer, a naturalist, a revolutionary anatomist.

Astounding, yes, but in Nicholl's treatment he was also poignantly human. He fell for a lover who took advantage of him financially for years. He had his share of abandoned projects, what the author refers to as "Leonardo's might-have-beens." Part of the beguiling thrill of Charles Nicholl's biography is the manner in which he meticulously salvages the fragmentary evidence, the missing half-lines, like the restorers of the Burlington House cartoon after a man shot it with a 12-bore in 1987. The author has not supplied so many new facts, but the arrangement of them brings a slippery genius down from his lonely pedestal and into the world of the men he worked with and for, and the women who dominate his paintings.

Of course, incompletion was also the result of a career that forced him to dodge from patron to patron, from Florence under the Medicis to Milan under the Sforzas to Rome under the Medicis again and finally to France under François I. The times were restless, to say the least, but so was he. His scattered fire may also have resulted from an uncertainty about his multiple gifts. For instance, he recommended himself to one patron as an inventor of war machines, mentioning his skill as a painter almost as an afterthought. In his last years, comfortably housed and given a generous pension by the French king, it was his knowledge and wisdom that were valued.

Nicholl concludes that it is his "writings and drawings which - perhaps even more than the paintings - take us directly into the life of Leonardo, as if they are themselves a kind of memory, cluttered with fragmentary records of the travails of his days, the secrets of his dreams, the flights of his mind."

Sometimes, Nicholl rushes to alchemise guesswork into fact, but he is honest about it and you can forgive these hard-won deductions. On one page, he wonders whether the woman who turns up in Milan in 1493 might be Leonardo's 60-year-old mother, Caterina. On the next page she suddenly is. With Freud, he notes the oedipal absence of the father from the bastard son's depictions of the Sacra Famiglia. Mercifully, he stops short of attributing Leonardo's homosexuality to a mother fixation, though he is brilliant on the dangers of playing "the backside game" in Lorenzo il Magnifico's Florence. The young Leonardo, anonymously accused of sodomy, may well have spent a night in the clink. Why and when else, wonders Nicholl, would he have designed a contraption "to open a prison from the inside"?

In this deeply researched, engaging and illuminating biography, Charles Nicholl is drawn again and again to Leonardo's preoccupation with flight -- his obsession, from his earliest infancy, with birds, as well as his designs for parachutes, hang-gliders, helicopters and planes. Nicholl will convince any reader that this fascination was a major, abiding concern of Leonardo's life, but he never tells us why this should be so. A very simple reason may be that levitation was the one thing that offered a reprieve from all that earthly movement. In the most fundamental sense, the aspiration to take flight deeply informed Leonardo's paintings, far beyond the depiction of birds and winged angels. Nicholl shows, for example, that the famous landscape drawing in Florence's Uffizi Gallery, proudly dated 1473 by a 21-year-old Leonardo, is not a sketch of any one view from a given spot, but a composite of various landscapes in the area around his hometown of Vinci -- a composite presented as if seen from the air. It is a bird's-eye view.

A certain quality of ethereal levitation pervades all of Leonardo's works. The untranslatable Italian word 'sfumato', which alludes to an effect like smoke disappearing into the air, well describes the characteristic atmosphere of Leonardo's painting. It was a technique devised to depict gradual transitions of light and shade, and its effect was to place objects into a surrounding atmosphere -- that is, into conditions that could have meaning only in the perceptual experience of a viewer. In fact, the paintings emerge looking like the result of a heightened visual experience, even a trancelike state. A fancy word for this process is sublimation -- literally, the transmutation of solids and liquids into airborne gas -- and it had real consequences for Leonardo's practical life as a painter. One by one, his works tended to untie themselves from the concrete circumstances of their commissions, remaining suspended in the more rarefied state of the work-in-progress or the autonomous Work of Art.

With this book, I must say, I got gradually more comfortable with Leonardo's genius and his Art, gaining a better overall understanding -- however, my awe of him did not diminish with this understanding. Rather, it increased!

When is a life not a life? (0/1 people found this helpful)

This book, like Leonardo himself, is somewhat of a puzzle. It is a five hundred page biography about a man whom it appears we actually know very little about in terms of his daily life and activities. Yes, we have his notebooks and some of his paintings, but these shed little light on his day to day life.

What is clear from this book is that there are very few hard facts about Leonardo to be found. The major Renaissance source of information is Vasari's Life of Painters, which is still in print, only it turns out that Vasari made most of his 'facts' up, and never even actually saw The Mona Lisa in the flesh, so Nicholl is left to piece together fragments.

This is a Time Team like affair where a line of scribbled writing on a manuscript page is analysed minutely by the author and then we are presented with an entire raft of highly plausible but ultimately unknowable events and ideas. Nicholls writes well, his subject is interesting but it is a book that left me frustrated, and only a little more illuminated than when I started it.

Nicholls focuses on Leonardo the artist, and there are good illustrations throughout to support this angle. He goes into considerably less detail on other matters such as anatomy, theories of flight (despite stressing how much this particular topic obsessed Leonardo) and his work with military engineering and water courses. This is a shame, as much of Leonardo's notebooks are taken up with these ideas and it is in these areas that there are no shortage of 'facts' and things to write.

The main problem here is that this puports to be a biography, but is written about a man who seemed both secretive and enigmatic. It would have been much more rewarding to have condensed the life into a hundred pages and used the next four hundred pages to explore Leonardo's own interests and ideas more deeply.

The man and his time (3/4 people found this helpful)

Superbly researched, beautifully written, this book vividly evokes the life and times of one of the truly great geniuses of all time. All the fascinating aspects of this complex man's personal life and manifold professional achievements (and failures) are described.

Strongly recommended for anyone with an interest in Da Vinci, Italian history and art or just a great biography.

A struggle in places but worth the perserverence (9/11 people found this helpful)

This book is an enlightening read about a truly remarkable man. Da Vinci lived like no other man of his time and like few since. This book explores his life in great detail and although it gets a little dry at times, generally it is a fascinating and inspiring read. Worth sticking with to get a great deal out of it.

He Ain't Heavy Although the Weight of Knowledge may be. (4/6 people found this helpful)

If you're expecting a pleasant little frolic through the 'Get Me Out of Here I'm a Celebrity' type all froth and no substance-Leonardo only used the best designers and ate at Chez Ratbag- forget it. If, however, you want to know more about the man, his works, and the Society that produced him read on. Yes! It is a trifle daunting, and involved, in parts but it takes you far beyond Mona Lisa. Leonardo was an extremely complex individual and this book helps you understand just how complex. I'm glad I persevered.

Leonardo Da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind

Charles Nicholl

Reader Reviews:

AWESOME AND BEAUTIFUL LEONARDO (2/2 people found this helpful)

When is a life not a life? (0/1 people found this helpful)

The man and his time (3/4 people found this helpful)

A struggle in places but worth the perserverence (9/11 people found this helpful)

He Ain't Heavy Although the Weight of Knowledge may be. (4/6 people found this helpful)

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