LEONARDO DA VINCI

Searching for Leonardo.

In a copiously illustrated volume, art historian Campbell considers the challenges of historical scholarship through his perceptive and authoritative analysis of the life, works, and afterlife of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). With only “partial and fragile evidence” of Leonardo’s life, many biographers have filled in the gaps with fictionalizations, creating a mythical persona—homosexual, vegetarian, solitary genius—who has become the central figure in what Campbell derides as “Da Vinci Worlds”: “environments in which the legacy of the Florentine artist polymath is put on show for a mass public of spectators.” He decries the commodification and commercialization that keeps Leonardo’s ghost alive before a voracious public through “the most hopeless new attribution, the most lurid conspiracy theory, the most preposterous evaluation.” Even many scholars, Campbell argues persuasively, reflect their own cultural milieu and assumptions about selfhood, agency, sexuality, and psychology rather than accounting for differences in Renaissance Europe. Campbell examines art historical and biographical interpretations surrounding many works, including The Last Supper, “stormy exchanges” generated by the Salvator Mundi, and the “dense thicket of myth and wishful thinking” surrounding the Mona Lisa, including the identity of the sitter and her connection to Leonardo. He contests the much-repeated idea that Leonardo was “ahead of his time,” which he sees as an “expression of glib superiority toward the past.” Campbell’s project in this book is precisely to embed Leonardo within the political, social, religious, and scientific tensions roiling European culture in the 1400s and 1500s; to construct what he calls an “anti-biography” that “seeks to make Leonardo unfamiliar”; and to ask: What does it mean to have a self, now and in the past? How can we understand “a nonmodern way of being a person”?

A vigorous meditation on life-writing and one artist’s reality.

A vigorous meditation life-writing and one artist’s reality.