Flashback, May 1519: Leonardo da Vinci, Quintessential ‘Renaissance Man,’ Dies

Three years and over the Alps from Florence and Milan, the city-states where he had staked out a reputation as a talent of wide-ranging brilliance and frequent infuriatingly late work, Leonardo da Vinci, 66, died in Amboise, France, five centuries ago this week. Not unlike his life, the events after his death have left his fate ambiguous: the church where he was buried was subsequently destroyed, so we cannot be completely sure we have his remains.

In a prior post on the death of Lisa Gherardini Gioconda—a.k.a. “Mona Lisa”—I discussed several aspects of Leonardo’s life that made him even more enigmatic than his iconic subject—namely, the myriads of notebooks in reverse handwriting meant to conceal his speculations and discoveries and his sexuality (two sodomy charges were suddenly and mysteriously dropped). But far more can and should be said about this many-sided genius.

There’s a nice, neat phrase for this kind of person: “Renaissance Man.” In our time, it’s practically useless, and easy to scorn. The late, lamented Spy Magazine chuckled that Caroline Kennedy’s husband, Edwin Schlossberg, was a "Renaissance man without a renaissance.” Six years ago, in a Saturday Night Live skit in which Justin Timberlake was welcomed into the “Five Timers Club” of guest hosts, he was introduced to fellow club member Steve Martin as a “Renaissance Man.”

“Do you play…the banjo?” Martin asked the pop star, referring to his instrument. When told no, Martin smiled triumphantly. 

But Leonardo’s attempts at multiple cultural pursuits were of an entirely different order from Schlossberg’s or Timberlake’s. I didn’t fully appreciate how much until I read Walter Isaacson’s 2017 biography, Leonardo da Vinci. Here is a list of the intellectual endeavors he pursued:

*painter;

*sculptor;

*scientist;

*botanist;

*architect;

*urban planner;

*public spectacle and pageantry—a kind of precursor of a theater scenic director; and

*musician.

(There was a downside to all of this, noted by his early biographer, Giorgio Vasari: “In erudition and letters he would have distinguished himself, if he had not been variable and unstable. For he set himself to learn many things, and when he had begun them gave them up.”)

Nor did I appreciate the contrasts between Leonardo and another “Renaissance Man,” his rival for painting commissions, Michelangelo Buonarroti:

* Leonardo was warm and gregarious; Michelangelo, cantankerous and quick with an insult;

* Leonardo was good-looking and blessed with a sharp sense of fashion, attracting all kinds of people; Michelangelo was dark, scruffy, and—since he often slept overnight in his studio—must have put some people off because he often neglected to bathe;

*Though both appear to have been gay, Leonardo did not alter his lifestyle to satisfy contemporary mores, while Michelangelo struggled desperately to remain chaste;

*Leonardo’s private scientific research led him to regard skeptically a number of doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, while Michelangelo remained intensely devout.

I was also surprised to learn that, by the end of his life, Leonardo, though he continued his scientific experimentation and offered intellectual advice when consulted by his latest patron, King Francis I of France, no longer cared to pick up a paintbrush. 

It is, of course, well-nigh impossible to become a “Renaissance Man” in the manner of Leonardo, Michelangelo, or, later, America’s own Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. Fields of knowledge are now so deep and specialized that they can require years of laser-like study. Moreover, the last decade has offered opportunities for digital distractions that lure people away from sustained intellectual and creative effort.

But the ideal of a well-rounded “Renaissance Man” that Leonardo epitomized should not become too foreign to us. Passions in one area of our lives can enrich us in another. The mind needs refreshment, to roam freely at play. 

The best example might be another Isaacson subject, Steve Jobs, who took a college course on design that influenced the creation of Apple products decades later.

In addition to Isaacson’s book and the section on Leonardo in Vasari, readers might also be interested in the following pieces on Leonardo:

*Michael White, Leonardo: The First Scientist. There is a valid question about Leonardo's influence as a scientist when his inability (and reluctance) to tell the world about his discoveries meant that it would take the world 200 years to rediscover what he had already learned. But White makes a convincing case that the artist "cross-fertilized ideas from different disciplines" in his work.

*The April 15 issue of New York Magazine contained a fascinating article by Matthew Shaer about how the auction house Christie's sold what is purportedly Leonardo's lost masterpiece Salvator Mundi, in a story of  "how the interests of dealers, museums, auction houses, and the global rich can conspire to build a masterpiece out of a painting of patchwork provenance and hotly debated authorship."

*The May 2019 issue of National Geographic featured a cover story by Claudia Kalb on how "pages from Leonardo's notebooks are finding their way into the hands of experts in the very fields Leonardo studied, from medicine and mechanical engineering to music."

*A 2016 article by Eric Blakemore for Smithsonian discusses one particular Leonardo discovery from the notebook: a 1493 observation of what seems to constitute "the first written evidence of the laws of friction."

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