Reason to smile

Leonardo

Martin Kemp

Oxford University Press: 286 pp., $26

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Leonardo da Vinci

Flights of the Mind

Charles Nicholl

Viking: 624 pp., $28.95

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For about 360 years after his death in 1519, Leonardo da Vinci levitated somewhere between history and myth. The great Italian artist and scientist was acknowledged by his peers and rulers of the time as a multitalented man whose intellect placed him among the most exalted of sages. Yet soon after his death, Leonardo’s copious notes, many drawings and paintings left the hands of his immediate heirs, disappearing into private collections across Europe. His autographed paintings sank into a sea of works by followers and imitators, and no one was sure what Leonardo actually had done. In short, he had a big reputation but scant product to back it up. Thus, the early commentators drawn to him could exercise imaginations largely unencumbered by inconvenient facts. Writers motivated by concerns as varied as aesthetics and revolutionary politics created their own Leonardos.

About 1880, his notebooks began to be copied and translated, his drawings exhibited and reproduced. Leonardo has since become the subject of what can only be described as a heavy industry of scholarship. There is now general consensus on which paintings and drawings are his and a greatly enriched understanding of his scientific and technological work.

Yet Leonardo remains elusive, hard to grasp in his totality. This is partly because his numerous interests -- painting, anatomy, geology, hydraulics -- today are each the purview of specialists. This makes a well-rounded book on the multifaceted Leonardo hard to come by. The gold standard of Leonardo monographs, most would agree, is Kenneth Clark’s “Leonardo da Vinci,” first published in 1939. The book is beautifully written, a wonderful combination of solid historical method and unerring critical intuition. But it is an art monograph. Much scholarship since Clark has centered on the master’s science and technology, and various attempts to define Leonardo have mostly fallen short. That was until Martin Kemp’s 1981 “Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man,” which argued persuasively for an underlying unity in the garrulous diversity of the artist’s thought and creative activity. The prizewinning book was the first of Kemp’s career and became the foundation for research on the nexus of art and science from the Renaissance to the present day. Kemp was ideal for this because he was trained both in science and in art history and has since had a distinguished career as a scholar, curator, critic and media commentator based at Oxford University.

Kemp’s recently published “Leonardo” marks a return to examine the total man after nearly 25 years (although Kemp has done much specialized work on the master in the interim). A natural suspicion arises: Is this “Leonardo Lite,” riding the tide of Dan Brown’s bestselling “The Da Vinci Code”? The answer is unequivocally no. Kemp’s latest is a serious book filled with fresh thought.

Historian Charles Nicholl also weighs in with “Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind,” a narrative biography rather than a concise, critical analysis of Leonardo’s thought. Nicholl weaves a panoramic and richly colored tapestry of Leonardo’s life and times, but the reader is smothered by inconsequential detail, making any intellectual focus or thematic structure hard to discern. His discussion of Leonardo’s science lacks a wider context, and he seems uncomfortable treating Leonardo’s works of art in terms other than their subject matter. Bottom line: This is a good read for getting the flavor of Leonardo’s world, but far less satisfying at explaining his creative accomplishments.

Kemp, in a preface to “Leonardo,” writes of sitting on the balcony of a villa in Chianti country that once was owned by the family into which, it seems, the real Mona Lisa was born. We are warmed by this “Under the Tuscan Sun” approach, but Kemp soon shifts to a clear expository style. His introduction lays out the core of thought elaborated in the following chapters: that Leonardo strove to subject observable “effects” in nature to rigorous scrutiny to ascertain their “causes.” He was convinced that nature had an inner unity, the clearest evidence of which was its proportional (geometric) character. The eye was the main sensory organ for grasping these relations. To understand “causes” was to have the power to manipulate “effects,” whether that manipulation consisted of creating a painting or remaking the world.

Kemp begins by underscoring the oddness of a career spent in various Renaissance courts, rather than in a traditional artist’s studio. He describes Leonardo’s commissions, his various court duties, his household and studio, and discusses his character. Kemp replaces the prototype of the 19th century Romantic-era garret-dwelling dreamer and procrastinator with a more plausible multi-tasking practical man.

The chapter “Looking” examines Leonardo’s extraordinary powers of sight and his ideas of the interplay of vision and mental processes. Several tenets are considered, the most important being the concept of necessity (the idea that form and function dovetail perfectly in nature). Kemp sketches a mind that had little patience for abstraction.

Another chapter, “The Body as Machine,” examines the relation of received knowledge to fresh observation and Leonardo’s understanding of the static and dynamic human body as a provocative parallel to the elements of engineering. In “The Living Earth,” Kemp explores the artist’s adaptation of the traditional idea of the microcosm versus macrocosm (that the body is the world in miniature and, conversely, that the world is the body writ large), his acute geological and hydrological observations, and the historical place of so brilliant a mind verging beyond the limitations and shortcomings of received knowledge toward a new framework for conceptualizing natural law.

In “Telling Tales,” Kemp traces the steps by which Leonardo developed a work of art. He presents the master’s paintings through an analogy to theater, analyzing the structure of the stage, the placement of scenery, actors and props, lighting and so forth. Kemp’s thoughts on how a Renaissance viewer would have related to Leonardo’s work, both public and private, are excellent.

The chapter “Lisa’s Room. Leonardo’s Afterlife “ falters a bit by attempting too much in too few pages: the claims that various cities and courts had on Leonardo; the fate of his tangible legacy; his fame (confined here to the writings of Goethe and Walter Pater); and finally, the Leonardo of recent research and fictional excess. What doesn’t come through is that these versions of the man often are linked to the political and/or artistic agenda of a given author, not simply effusions of purple prose.

Still, Kemp closes “Leonardo” in perfect pitch: “I would say that no one ever used the tools of visual representation more compellingly and with more inventiveness to communicate the eternally fresh thrill of visual insight, as we learn to ‘see’ in the sense of ‘understand.’ ”

Why read this book instead of Kemp’s first on Leonardo? The main difference, aside from length (this one is about half the size of the earlier work), is that the author adopts a thematic approach, in contrast to his earlier chronological, biographical one. Put another way, he stresses continuities instead of phases of Leonardo’s development. One can profitably read both, but the new book provides a better introduction. It also includes a basic bibliography, a timeline of Leonardo’s life and illustrations of artworks by -- or closely associated with -- the master. Besides, the earlier work is long out of print.

It is a new trend to write short books on writers, thinkers and artists. What is the measure of success in the “short” category? Presumably not the page count, but whether an author says what needs to be said, but not too much. By this standard, Kemp has succeeded at something that is possible only after years of reflection. *