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 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 are finding their way
into the hands of experts in the very fields Leonardo studied, from
medicine and mechanical engineering to music."
