Renaissance man in all his richness

The major challenge faced by biographers of artists is the almost impossible one of dealing with equal authority with their lives and works. It is tempting to wonder whether this is not one of the reasons why so few of them are written by art historians, although there are of course heroic exceptions, of which John Richardson’s ongoing Picasso is perhaps the most illustrious.

In the specific case of Leonardo da Vinci, there is the additional problem of the seeming universality of his range of interests, above all in the direction of the sciences. Charles Nicholl’s approach is explicitly to start from Leonardo’s writings, not just about optics, anatomy, and so on, but also about such less elevated concerns as the day’s shopping list. In less sensitive hands, this could be construed as a deliberate decision to cut the magus down to size, but actually what it achieves is to allow us to envisage the creator of the ‘Mona Lisa’ and the ‘Last Supper’ going about his daily business, and perhaps above all to get to know something of his entourage — the scoundrelly Salai, a delinquent of limitless seductive charm (for Leonardo, if no one else), and the dependable but no less enticing Francesco Melzi. Nicholl is also very good on Leonardo’s patrons and their worlds, and rightly emphasises the literally murderous charisma of the likes of Cesare Borgia. He is not averse to the occasional psychoanalytic speculation, and some of Leonardo’s weirder musings — and not just the famous primal memory of childhood that attracted Freud’s attention — are hard not to interpret as the unwitting products of his unconscious, but on the whole he resists any temptation to turn speculations into truths. Only when he constructs a scenario involving the apparently single-mindedly homosexual Leonardo having sex with a woman from Cremona for quasi-experimental purposes did I wholly lose faith.