The real Da Vinci code

Leonardo Da Vinci(1452-1519) is the Napoleon of the world of art. The flood of books about him is interminable, as if no art historian, critic or biographer can face himself in the mirror without tackling this Everest of a subject. The two latest efforts to explain this universal genius could not be more different.

In fact, it is the Oxford Professor of Art History, Martin Kemp, who has given us a brief, concise, entirely unspeculative account, while the more literary writer, Charles Nichol, author of a prize-winning study of Christopher Marlowe, has produced a massive, scholarly, detailed exploration of the artist which constantly speculates about influences, events and other personalities of the Italian Renaissance.

The central paradox of Leonardo is that while he did so much and left posterity some 20,000 pages of his copiously illustrated notebooks, written entirely in mirror script, there are so few acknowledged and authenticated paintings. About 20 in all, including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, some of which are only partly by him, some of which he left unfinished.

Even that notoriously slow worker Vermeer left around 40 pictures.

Leonardo's fame and his durable, even permanent, reputation rest not just on his slender painterly output, not merely on the almost hypnotic quality of his oil paintings, but on the copious output of drawings and the fact that the phrase 'Renaissance man' might have been coined for him. Yet relatively little is known about him. The first major chronicler of the era, Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives Of The Artists devoted only 5,000 words to Leonardo and 40,000 to Michelangelo, not as a measure of their relative merits but as an indicator of the available information. Leonardo was secretive. His habit of writing in mirror script was due probably to a mixture of his being left-handed, illegitimate and homosexual at a time when any of these characteristics was sufficient to make him an outsider and someone therefore intensely private. To find all three then serious disadvantages combined in one man, and one possessed of the most fertile and inventive mind of the age, was almost as extraordinary as his prodigious talent.

Although Leonardo's lawyer father got him an apprenticeship in Verrochio's studio, he disinherited him when he had legitimate children, but a kindly uncle left him his modest estate. Leonardo was once locked up, suspected of sodomy with a teenager, but was not charged. He was, however, soon receiving lucrative commissions from the great ruling families, the Medicis in Florence and the Sforzas in Milan.

He was a highly paid consultant on engineering, fortification and other military matters. He produced magnificent anatomical drawings which gave new insights into female anatomy, the workings of the human eye and other physiological topics.

There was hardly any technological problem, from the use of pulleys to lift huge weights to the concept of powered flight, which he did not comprehend, analyse and illustrate.

He consorted with princes and Popes and spent his declining years as artist and thinker in residence to Francis I, King of France, who housed him in a grand mansion in the grounds of one of his own palaces and paid him a vast salary.

To this day I can recall every detail of my visit, nearly 40 years ago, to a shabby, rundown little museum in Krakow in Poland, and coming face to face with Leonardo's The Lady With The Ermine, the portrait he painted of Ludovico Sforza's mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, in 1490. While not as enigmatic or mysterious as the Mona Lisa its tranquil, quietly confident beauty is haunting and indelible.

The Last Supper, in Milan, whose recent restoration reveals that relatively little of Leonardo's original paint has survived, is still awe-inspiring. The Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris can be seen only behind bullet-proof glass, for a matter of a few seconds, before the sheer pressure of the crowds forces you to move on. Yet both paintings are still unforgettable. Leonardo, the prodigious genius, can be elusive, hard to grasp. If you want a brisk, notably lucid canter through the known facts plus a sensitive analysis of the major works, Kemp is your man. If you want a highly detailed, frequently discursive and speculative survey of half a century of Renaissance Italy, read Nichol.

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