Inside Leonardo’s Mind
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Of all the so-called universal geniuses – Goethe, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and so on – Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) would, I suspect, have the most difficulty getting on in today’s world. (Not surprising, really; he had plenty of difficulty in his own time.) We tend to value hyper-specialization, which results in depth of knowledge but also extreme narrowness. We also value achievement, seeing projects through to completion, over dreamy potential.
And Leonardo? From our vantage, his brilliance seems as scattered as glass shards from a cup dashed on the floor: He is probably thought of more as a generic “genius” than as a great painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, musician, designer, or natural philosopher. Yet despite his being a distantly broad character, we are these days awash in a sort of Leonardo mania – not all of it, one hopes, due to the massive success of the “Da Vinci Code.” In 2003, the Metropolitan Museum presented an enormous exhibition, “Leonardo da Vinci Master Draftsman;” and 2006 will see the inauguration of the “Universal Leonardo” project, a program of exhibitions, lectures, and the like that will take place throughout Europe.
One of the first things we learn from two ambitious, new, and very different books on the man -“Leonardo” (Oxford, 286 pages, $26) by the Oxford art historian and originator of the “Universal Leonardo” project Martin Kemp, and “Leonardo da Vinci” (Allen Lane, 400 pages, $45.73) by Charles Nicholl – is that the very qualities that would have made Leonardo such a bad fit in our world, ranging intellectual omnivorousness and scattershot interests, also make him a keenly difficult subject to write about.
Mr. Nicholl, who is the author of 11 other books of history and biography, including an outstanding historical biography-cum-nonfiction murder mystery on the death of Christopher Marlowe, offers a full-scale chronological biography. Rightly described on the dust jacket as “the leading authority on Leonardo’s art and science,” Mr. Kemp has written a relatively brief introduction to what he calls “the essential nature of Leonardo da Vinci, both in himself and as a historical phenomenon” – an intellectual biography then, arranged by theme.
Because of their distinct aims, each approaches Leonardo’s multifariousness quite differently, though they walk much of the same ground. After a quick summary of Leonardo’s career, Mr. Kemp opens the thematic body of his book with a chapter called “Looking.” We would call Leonardo an empiricist, a devotee of observation; he believed the true life of the mind began in the eye. He always placed the visual arts, which begin with looking, over literature.
Some may find it telling that his father, a notary, made his living by writing. That Leonardo himself habitually wrote backwards, in mirror writing, proves irresistible to the pop psychologist (as it was to Freud).But it seems a paramount irony that the legacy of this man, who left few finished paintings and completed no major sculptures, resides primarily in a copious treasure of notes, fugitive manuscripts, and drawings. It is from this fertile soil that both books draw sustenance.
The trouble any biographer faces is how to cram the extraordinary range of thoughts and investigations recorded by these manuscripts into a single vessel called Leonardo da Vinci. Mr. Kemp tosses a theoretical net:
The overarching premises on which Leonardo operated is that all apparent diversities of nature are symptoms of an inner unity, a unity dependent on something like a ‘unified field theory’ that reaches out to explain the functioning of everything in the observable world. For Leonardo, this unified theory relied up on the proportional (geometrical) action of every power in the world and explained the design of everything.
This is convincing, although it emphasizes the mathematical, or scientific, side of Leonardo at the expense of the artist. Thus, under Mr. Kemp’s formulation, Leonardo’s chief contribution to art – creating idealized pictures of life through rigorous observation – stems from a desire to body forth our “inner unity.” It doesn’t tell us much about how the artist thought about beauty, that is, why he arrived at the particular idealizations we find in the paintings. For instance, it explains how Leonardo amalgamated various real, observed landscapes into the backgrounds of his canvases, but it remains silent on the question of why he painted the specific landscapes – often craggy and romantic – we see in a given work.
Mr. Nicholl, too, understands the need to reconcile Leonardo’s scientific and engineering activities with his artistic pursuits, and he does so by jumping on the other end of the seesaw, emphasizing the artist over the technician. Most of Leonardo’s interests – anatomy or the behavior of water or even the design of hoists and pulleys – can be explained, in Mr. Nicholl’s words, as “his complete-science-for-the-painter project.” Unlike Mr. Kemp, however, who strives to explain the Leonardo that has come down to us, Mr. Nicholl is concerned not just with the Leonardo we know through paintings and codices but the man who lived and who was known to his contemporaries.
Properly, given how little we really know about Leonardo, Mr. Nicholl’s unifying theory is context: he excels at weaving the individual into the fabric of his time. Leonardo lived in a world that didn’t fret over broad pursuits. One didn’t have to be just a child endocrinologist or just a Hollywood lighting designer; one could, like Michelangelo, be a sculptor and painter and architect and poet without being thought a dilettante. Of course, even in this weave Leonardo seemed an oddly colored thread. He took jobs as diverse as professional musician, interior decorator, stage designer, military engineer, portraitist, and civil engineer; he invented or designed windmills, textile machines, parachutes, automata, musical instruments, flying machines, and, according to one NASA scientist, “the first known example in the story of civilization of the programmable analogue computer.” He also produced a handful of the most consistently revered artworks in history, not to mention a catalog of drawings unmatched in scope and excellence. No historical tapestry could cover such an individual.
There are those who would argue that the total body of knowledge in the late 15th and early 16th centuries was small enough to be mastered by a single person, a person like Leonardo. But the fact is Leonardo did not master all the knowledge of his time, nor did any man. The folly of such thinking is exemplified in the failings of Mr. Nicholl’s praiseworthy biography.
Its faults are inherent in the vastness of its subject. Neither a scientist nor an art historian, Mr. Nicholl writes eloquently on both aspects of Leonardo’s life – for the general reader. When discussing paintings, for example, he never delves deep into connoisseurship or the scholarly record. His judgments lean toward banality: “‘The Musician’ is one of the most vivid of the studio portraits.” His command of Renaissance history is admirable, but too often the lens of history serves only to shrink the object – Leonardo – it is trained upon.
In a gnomic “prophecy,” Leonardo once wrote, “There will appear gigantic figures in human shape, but the nearer you get to them, the more their immense stature will diminish.” For Mr. Nicholl to have preserved Leonardo’s stature amidst the roiling times in which he lived would have required an imaginative and scholarly effort that is, frankly, inconceivable. What he has produced is an eminently readable, extremely informative – and informed – narrative of Leonardo’s life. Similarly, Mr. Kemp provides an introduction to Leonardo that is a model of lucidity and concision. To do more would require a one-off masterpiece, a “Mona Lisa” of prose.
Speaking of the “Mona Lisa,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “The picture becomes more wonderful to us than she really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing.” Reading these books, one can’t help feeling Leonardo was in fact more wonderful than we can know. Part of his secret, of which he probably knew everything, was incompleteness. When we learn that a bridge Leonardo had designed to cross the Bosporus was actually made in Norway in 2001; when we stand before one of his unfinished paintings and imagine just what he might have done next; when we hear that a pyramid-shaped parachute based on one of his little sketches managed to bring a man safely to earth from 10,000 feet in 2000, Leonardo’s image, his picture, becomes more wonderful to us. We are completing him still.