LEONARDO DA VINCI

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson ; Published by Simon and Schuster;Pages 599;Price Rs.1199/-

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There is no doubt that the best biographer today is Walter Isaacson. There is also no doubt that Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest men in History.

Walter Isaacson, the author of the book under review was Editor of Time and biographer of three great men---Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs. The subjects of his previous books were all blue-sky thinkers, with the ability “to make connections across the disciplines” and “to marry observation and imagination”.His new subject is well chosen. Few men were as polymathically brilliant, or as downright weird, as da Vinci.

There is a significant difference, though, between “Leonardo da Vinci” and Isaacson’s previous biographies. His other geniuses left behind bountiful source material about the lives they led. Leonardo did not.

There are about 7200 pages of Leonardo’s notes , representing about a quarter of what he wrote during his life. They are rich in maps, doodles, anatomical drawings, schema for new machines, models for new weapons, proposals for city redesigns, geometric patterns, portraits, eddies, swirls, curls, scientific observations of uncanny prescience. (Among the most staggering: He intuited the first and third laws of motion, 200 years ahead of Newton.)

Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo's genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history's most creative genius.

                                            

Isaacson’s biography summarise the differing versions of Leonardo that have been in circulation from the time Vasari praised him in his Lives of the Artists. He was at once the colossal genius who wouldn’t bow down to influential patrons and the feckless fantasist who did not execute his assignments. Leonardo was the truly Renaissance Man to whom maths and science were as important as painting; he was also the artist who “left posterity the poorer” by pursuing hobbies – engineering, architecture, pageantry, military strategy, cartography, etc – on which his talents were wasted.

Though he was born illegitimate no great stigma was attached to him: it meant he grew up with two mothers. He did not suffer due to lack of a formal education. He proudly declared that he was self-taught and he valued experience and his greatest asset was a relentless curiosity—like a small child.

At 14, he was apprenticed to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, who was “astonished” by his talent and with whom he collaborated before producing at least two early masterpieces,The Annunciation and (his first non-religious effort, and one to rank with the Mona Lisa) Ginevra de’ Benci.

The rise of Michelangelo (20-odd years his junior) may have been a factor in his preference for Milan: having spent much of his 30s and 40s there, he returned in his mid-50s. Milan was vastly bigger than Florence and was well stocked with intellectuals and scientists . Later he moved to Rome and later still, leaving Italy for the first time, to France. But it was Milan that encouraged the odd mixture of the practical and the fantastical that went into his inventions – his schemes for flying machines, giant crossbows, scythed chariots, needle grinders, screw jacks and so on.

According to Isaacson , his inventions and ideas occupy an important place in the history of science and technology, anticipating the discoveries of Galileo and Newton. He contributed to medical knowledge too: by dissecting the body of a 100-year-old man, he came up with the first description of arteriosclerosis as an outcome of the ageing process.

Isaacson is appropriately reverential towards the Mona Lisa, using it to underline one of his main themes – Leonardo’s sfumato technique, whereby lines are blurred and boundaries (like those between art and science) disappear.

While Isaacson makes no claim to fresh discoveries, we find that his biography is very cleverly arranged organised, lucidly written and beautifully illustrated .

Leonardo’s thirst for knowledge was that of a small child endlessly asking “Why?” His last drawings were turbulent images of water and wind. His entire existence is the culmination of a lifelong drive to find connections between natural phenomena – to link the curve of waves to a curl of human hair.

Isaacson emphasises Leonardo’s role as the scientist and innovator, the engineer and secret doctor . Between 1508 and 1513, Leonardo skinned at least 20 cadavers, some as they were decomposing in his hands, in order to study and draw muscle groups, organs, skeins of veins. His analysis of the human body was so thorough that he determined how the aortic valve worked 450 years before the medical establishment did.

Isaacson is at his most eloquent when he analyses what made Leonardo human. He was an inveterate deadline misser, more beguiled by starting projects than finishing them. He abandoned a 23-foot equestrian statue intended for a prince; he gave up on paintings and murals intended for wealthy patrons; he sketched “flying machines that never flew, tanks that never rolled, a river that was never diverted.”

Leonardo said. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”

Leonardo was an implacable perfectionist. He worked on the Mona Lisa for 16 years, and it was in his bedroom when he died.

Leonardo was strikingly devoid of ego, “more interested in pursuing knowledge than in publishing it.” According to Isaacson . “He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history.”

Reading this biography makes us realise how indifferent to glory Leonardo was.

Leonardo da Vinci from a distance was the master painter, sculptor, scientist, architect and engineer’s intellect seems remote, god-like; up close, he’s more human. He struggled with arithmetic and Latin; he was a habitual fantasist; he indulged his handsome young companion Salai, who he admitted was “a liar, a thief, stubborn and a glutton”; he lived in a state of constant obsession but constant distraction – his great mind’s great flaw was that it rarely finished anything.

Isaacson’s book is structured as a series of chronological essays on da Vinci’s life based on the contents of his notebooks, which teem with sketches, landscapes, lists, experiments, stories, scientific theories, ideas, portraits of gender-fluid angels and autobiographical notes.

Drawings from the notebooks are reproduced throughout the text, along with High Renaissance paintings and sculptures.

Isaacson’s portrait of the artist written 500 years after da Vinci’s death takes us as close as we can get.

The biography is an astonishing achievement and one that deserves to be widely read. This biography is a beautiful book and Isaacson is a fine writer .

P.P.Ramachandran.

19/04/2020.