Leonardo
Bramly, Serge
BOOK REVIEWS ying, and having D turned already to the Christian God Whom he had managed to sidestep most of his life, Leonardo da Vinci asked forgiveness for the scant attention he had given his...
...Leonardo did not work long in Cesare's employ...
...The sixteenth-century painter Vasari wrote in his Lives of the Artists that "the reason [Leonardo] failed was that he endeavored to add excellence to excellence and perfection to perfection...
...Curiosity accounts for the numberless superb sketches and studies in his notebooks, many of them with decidely unbeautiful subjects...
...candelabras ; a variable-intensity table lamp and another which would produce a very bright light...
...To attempt to comprehend everything, from flower to star, and to turn that understanding into art was the genius of Shakespeare...
...S urely Leonardo felt disappointment at these projects gone awry, but he must have been relieved too, of a burden of anxious boredom: painting did not consume him, and at a certain point in the work his interest in it began to wane...
...He improved or invented musical instruments...
...a bathhouse and a washhouse...
...Bramly lists among his early works an olive press...
...Patrons called upon Verrocchio for ceremonial occasions, and the shop made masks, costumes, stage sets...
...Grand projects went bust all over the place, and men of lesser gifts surpassed him in the world's admiration...
...How does one speak of the life Leonardo lived, without making the fatal mistake of condescension...
...it was especially renowned for catering jousting tournaments...
...As he clearly put it, "To reflect is noble, to realize is servile...
...It is a face to be stared at, in wonder, but not one to be figured out...
...The notebooks are a relic of genius, but the myriad observations, sketches, projects never undertaken that one finds therein reveal a fragmented life even in the attempt to comprehend everything...
...he was, with Machiavelli, with Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modernity, "for the relief of man's estate...
...When he dissected criminal corpses in the medical schools, he devised a method of keeping his fingernails clean...
...Elevated to the rank of ducal engineer, Leonardo took a great part in putting on the numerous festivals that kept the court amused...
...and in time of peace, sculpting in marble, bronze, and clay, "[giving] perfect satisfaction and [being] the equal of any man in architecture," and painting "as well as any man, whoever he be...
...As the art of war was the most important of arts in Renaissance Italy, it was the natural form for someone aspiring to the highest artistic mastery...
...Only his hand and eye could have realized the extant paintings, however...
...The Adoration of the Magi, a large altarpiece, his first effort in the grand manner, bogged down in unfinished business...
...Yet most ofthe work Leonardo did for the Duke of Milan was peaceable enough...
...The terms of this internal struggle are severe...
...some folding furniture...
...Marauding French soldiers knocked the clay statue to pieces...
...What did his life amount to, when he neglected or abandoned his talent as a painter yet managed to produce a masterpiece with most every painting he finished...
...So wrote Walter Pater in hisessay on Leonardo in The Renaissance...
...Tell me if I have ever done anything that . . ." The bitterness of failure never quite left his tongue...
...With Machiavelli's blessing, Leonardo began a canal project designed to end the war between Florence and Pisa, and he received a commission to paint a huge battle scene (the never-to-be-finished Battle of Anghiari...
...BOOK REVIEWS ying, and having D turned already to the Christian God Whom he had managed to sidestep most of his life, Leonardo da Vinci asked forgiveness for the scant attention he had given his true vocation, recognizing "how much he had offended God by not working on his art as much as he should have...
...Appointed military engineer to Cesare de Borgia, he made the acquaintance of Niccolt) Machiavelli, the secretary of the Florentine Republic...
...It is a brilliant essay, except for the most famous part, his magniloquent twaddle about the Mona Lisa...
...The bright splash of light on the ermine's muzzle highlights its fierce animal strangeness, while the lighting of the woman's face shows a pallid indifference...
...He bends, corrects, dominates Nature," Bramly writes...
...Still, it is only by comparison with the greatest artist who ever lived that Leonardo's life seems lacking...
...The Battle of Anghiari, a fresco for the Florentine Council Chamber that Bramly calls "as violent, brutal, and terrible" as any picture ever made, was lost LEONARDO: DISCOVERING THE LIFE, OF LEONARDO DA VINCI Serge Bramly HarperCollins/493 pages/$35 reviewed by ALGIS VALIUNAS 50 The American Spectator August 1992 when the wall where it was to be painted was treated with the wrong undercoating...
...The admiration, however, failed to prompt Leonardo ever to finish the job...
...One page full of cats, shown from all angles, sleeping, preening, tumbling, stalking, reveals the power of his gaze, and the quickness of his pen...
...Facil cosa e farsi universale," he declared, while still young...
...Yet Leonardo's persistence in this work—once again in Milan, he made great improvements in the system of canal locks—shows an undaunted spirit...
...they practice no virtue whatsoever...
...some say the violin is his making...
...Every aspect of nature begged him to turn his mind in its direction...
...mirrors (in particular, the octagonal mirror that would multiply indefinitely the image of a man standing inside it, which he may have used for his self-portrait...
...Bramly calls enigma "the true subject" of the Mona Lisa...
...Compared with, say, Shakespeare, however, Leonardo's accomplishment seems somewhat stunted...
...erential tone, the life of so great a man and his continual failures...
...these military skills were yet only potential...
...He also provided the first description of arteriosclerosis...
...the head turned up in a second-hand store, the rest in a cobbler's shop, nailed to the bench...
...the proportions were all wrong, making forced labor out of what ought to have been effortless motion...
...In the conflict between genius and genius, knowing the world took precedence over rendering it...
...S o much that no one else could have painted never will be done...
...The smoke from this project joined that of other schemes in a noxious cloud of failure...
...Our only real complaint is that he did not leave us more...
...the losses were many, and they could not be made good...
...Machiavelli wrote of a hurricane that struck the Val d'Arno, including the Vinci district, in 1456: "By this example God wishes to bring back into men's hearts the memory of his might...
...counterweights to make a door close automatically...
...This pungent misanthropy casts a pall over the public-spirited good intentions of the scientist-inventor-benefactor...
...When it came to painting, however, he balked, grew timid...
...By 1472, Leonardo had proved himself sufficiently to take a hand in painting, and the kneeling angel he produced for Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ was a measure of his talent: its beauty so nonplussed his master that he vowed never to paint again...
...Much of his work was ephemeral, then, for only by chance might some drawing survive...
...This ambivalence—personal ecstasy set against public benefit—is the great issue of philosophy both The American Spectator August 1992 51 during and after the Renaissance...
...Offering his services to the Duke of Milan in 1481, he presented himself as a man skilled in the technology of war: he claimed to be adept at building portable bridges...
...Of course, the most famous painting in the world is precisely not revealing...
...During the nineteenth century, a masterful but incomplete St...
...Bramly admonishes that Leonardo might be blowing smoke about his accomplishments...
...B orn in 1452, the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary, Leonardo came to Florence at the age of 17 and became an apprentice in the bottega or workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, sculptor by appointment to the Medici, and an able painter, engineer, and goldsmith besides...
...In Milan, where he went in 1481, shortly after failing to finish the Adoration, he undertook to sculpt the greatest equestrian monument ever, a cavallo grandissimo standing twenty-five feet high, in honor of Ludovico da Sforza's late father, Francesco, former Duke of Milan...
...it is an easy thing to make yourself a universal man, and the entire universe held him in rapture...
...curiosity often in conflict with the desire of beauty, but generating in union with it, a type of subtle and curious grace...
...He did the first landscape drawing in the history of Western art in 1473, a Tuscan scene "in vivid detail, as if to etch it forever in memory, as if it represented in the artist's secret heart the setting for some great emotion...
...Leonardo: Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci, a new biography by the French novelist Serge Bramly, touchingly documents, in an appropriately revAlgis Valiunas is a writer living in Chicago...
...all that remains after them is a full latrine...
...Of the human eye, he wrote in his notebooks, "This is where human discourse turns toward the contemplation of the divine...
...Apprenticeship was a long and exacting process, and in the beginning Leonardo was limited to scut work: making paintbrushes, stretching canvases, mixing pigments...
...As Bramly puts it, "From the start, he witnessed the harnessing of artistry to skilled engineering...
...Painting was above all "a thing of the mind...
...Bramly's is a sad account of the most remarkable man in a remarkable time who, for all his talents, lived and died unfulfilled...
...All the world interested him, and the concentration required for making paintings tore him from his multifarious intellectual passions...
...He sought to calm the tumultuous waters into a domesticated stream...
...Considering himself a "uomo senza lettere," an unlettered man, he set himself to learn Latin when he was over 40...
...No one had had an eye quite likeLeonardo's before...
...Compared with any artist of his time, even Michelangelo, Leonardo is the supreme figure...
...Nevertheless, inspired by the Milanese system of waterways, he continued to work on his own, planning a canal from Florence to the sea with a riverside assemblage of mills—saltpeter, silk, paper—creating a prosperity never before imagined...
...There were other notable failures...
...tell me...
...In 1501, his cartoon for Virgin and Child with Saint Anne drew huge crowds of admirers when it was put on display for two days...
...0 52 The American Spectator August 1992...
...His failures were an inevitable part of his sort of genius...
...Curiosity and the desire of beauty—these are the two elementary forces in Leonardo's genius...
...His genius desired to take in everything, and he went about educating himself in the piecemeal, even haphazard, manner of the autodidact...
...This love did not belong to his art, either, yet something has to be said of the gift he had and the use he put it to...
...Bramly writes: His ideal would consist of imagining the picture and getting someone else to paint it...
...The loss seems largely ours now, rather than his...
...locks for chests...
...A magnificent clay model was made, but the ambition to cast it in bronze, and in a single piece, exceeded even Leonardo's capacity...
...Scholarly without being overbearing, handsomely written without being facile, this biography is a fine introduction to one of the greatest lives ever lived, however short of perfection that life might have been...
...Being just the sort of genius he was was a kind of miscreancy...
...Leonardo was to fight back against this terrifying power...
...a therapeutic armchair...
...drying up moats...
...Science is a way of knowing Him "who invented so many marvelous things...
...The portrait of Cecilia Gallerani holding an ermine shows a sullen young woman, nervy but reined-in, with a handsome domesticated creature that she is calming for the moment but whose taut poised body bespeaks every inclination to turn feral...
...A masquerade costume, a hanged man, sexual intercourse shown in section, profiles of old men and young: all the world was fair game, and the sketches flowed abundantly from his pen...
...Nine completed paintings were all he had to show...
...Machiavelli does not often speak of God, and when he does it is to emphasize the divine power to take life away just as He had given it...
...Estranged though Leonardo was from Christian piety, he was however not without natural piety...
...It is in the paintings that curiosity and beauty coalesce, provided always that Leonardo remained curious enough about what was to come of the picture to consider it worth finishing...
...The first major project of Verrocchio's that Leonardo may have taken part in was the capping of the Duomo with a ball and cross...
...His mental habits seem an odd blend of relentlessly focused intensity and perpetual distraction...
...noiselessly digging secret tunnels...
...a crane for emptying ditches...
...invention was what mattered most to him...
...Give your figures an attitude that reveals the thoughts your characters have in their minds," Leonardo wrote, as his by-word...
...His obsession was the mastery of nature...
...Jerome was discovered in Rome, in pieces, by Cardinal Fesch, one of Napoleon's uncles...
...his oeuvre stands without peer, and makes his entire life seem a work of art...
...casting mortars...
...The engineering proposal was to divert the Arno above Pisa, cutting off its water supply and closing its estuary harbor, in order to win a bloodless victory...
...The desire to be left alone with his work—in optics, hydraulics, astronomy, geology, anatomy, mathematics—coexists in a philosopher's untiring happiness with the need to serve the human good where nature presses it harshly...
...To know the world is to love it, so thrilling is the passion for knowledge...
...one wishes Leonardo had been more of a maker and less of a thinker, but who will deny genius its choice...
...he loved the contemplative life, and the life of a man of action, more than he did his painting...
...The face of the angel Uriel in the Virgin of the Rocks is of the most exquisite spiritual beauty ever painted...
...Periodically, in his notebooks, when he was getting the hang of a new pen, he would write, "Tell me if anything has ever been achieved...
...t was not until twenty years later, and under another master, that he got the chance to practice the art of war...
...His genius had led him elsewhere than to the palette and the unfinished canvas...
...His passion became to know nature, and to conquer nature when possible...
...No one else could have painted it...
...The large liquid eyes, heavy lidded, take in the prayerful exchange between the infant Christ and John the Baptist with sublime gravity, high joy laced with sorrow at the suffering to come...
...After six months of repeated failure, the project was abandoned...
...the force of her buried life lies in the mastering curve of her hand that holds back the ermine...
...The tender repose of the figure, the kind wisdom of her eyes, have inspired commentators to gush forth reams of speculation about her meaning...
...making "fire-throwing engines, of beautiful and practical design...
...His real love is elsewhere than in the mass of men his projects shall serve...
...It is not always compassion that Leonardo shows toward his human brethren: How many people there are who could be described as mere channels for food, producers of excrement, fillers of latrines, for they have no other purpose in the world...
...destroying a fortress "even if it is built on rock...
...Yet what he failed to make of himself tormented him...
...Nevertheless, Bernard Berenson said it was "a great masterpiece and perhaps the quattrocento produced nothing greater...
Vol. 25 • August 1992 • No. 8
