If I’m like many people, knowledge on the life of Leonardo da Vinci is severely lacking in the U.S.A. Popular culture believes da Vinci is a great man, a giant of the Renaissance. We know him as the painter of The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. And as the drawer of the Vitruvian Man. But how much do we know about his entire life? What were the sum of his accomplishments aside from these few well known works?
Somewhere, sometime, most likely at a thrift shop, I picked up a copy of Leonardo da Vinci: The Tragic Pursuit of Perfection. It’s a hard copy published in 1938, a translation from a work in German. The original author is Antonina Vallentin, and the translator was E.W. Dickes. The hardcover I read doesn’t indicate the date of the original work, just the translation. The book is 537 pages, not counting the Endnotes, Bibliography, and Index. Quite a lengthy work that took me well over a month to read in eight to ten page chunks.
As I said, my knowledge of da Vinci was pretty slim when I started reading this. I learned quite a lot from the book. How da Vinci was from Florence (which I may have known); that he spent most of his most productive years in Milan (which I didn’t know); that he left behind a lot of works that would be classified as products of military engineering (which I didn’t know); that he made a poor living from his art (surprise, surprise) and had to rely on the patronage of dukes and kings, of wealthy merchants and popes to survive (as to be expected).
He felt rejected by the powers that be in his native Florence, so he moved to Milan. There he entered into the service of Lodovico Sforza, preemptive duke of Milan, and for him worked up great plans for public works, for military works, and for monuments honoring the duke. One was of a great horse, which da Vinci labored long over, and finally completed the model for what was intended to be cast in bronze. Alas, at the time of war the bronze was sold and the statue was never built.
That situation, of a work started but not finished, is the story of da Vinci’s life as presented in the book. He was always going off on studies. He was commissioned to paint a battle scene on the wall of some building, and made many sketches of of what the painting would be. He studied horses minutely so that he could be accurate in his painting. Sketches upon sketches survive in his files. Alas, the painting was never completed, in fact may never have been started. That scenario is presented over and over in the book.
Known more for his art, da Vinci left relatively few artworks that can be positively identified as his. But he left a great treasure of his written works. These show a man who was a thinker, who produced deep thoughts, wrote them down, prepared a plan for thinking them through to a scientific breakthrough—and then never finished what he started. He studied anatomy (dissecting many human corpses) of humans and animals. He studied plants. He studied rivers and marshes and developed means of re-channeling and draining them to recover land. He studied the heavens and tried to present them in a logical way to the Renaissance world. All of these he wrote out in notebooks, or sketched on paper, but never finished.
As I progressed through the book I got the distinct impression “Wow, this guy never finished anything!” A biographer has much leeway in how they write, and in the facts they decide to feature and those they decide to suppress. Ms Vallentin’s picture of da Vinci, as translated by Dickes, is not what I would call flattering. It is the story of a misunderstood and under-appreciated genius. His family never understood or appreciated him, so he moved to Florence and had little to do with them. The artistic community didn’t appreciate him. Sforza didn’t appreciate him, and failed to follow through on the many projects da Vinci proposed. Actually, there was one area in which the duke and other patrons used da Vinci, and in which he followed through: to create temporary artworks for grand festivals. None of these survive, of course.
Two paragraphs near the end of the book provide a good summary of the book, and of the impression it leaves with me of da Vinci:
His masterpieces destroyed or decaying, his vast knowledge un-utilized, the immense mass of scientific material he had been collecting all his life preserved only in chests and boxes, in incomplete records written in a secret script and, in their existing form, quite inaccessible to mankind…Leonardo began to ask himself whether they ever would come to light. He no longer had the illusion that he could complete his many works for publication in his lifetime. He began to admit that he had attempted a superhuman task, to realize that he was defeated.
Thus was the grandest effort ever made by any man to explore and interpret the universe defeated by this man’s mortality. His unique career, a lifetime devoted to research in every field of knowledge, ended without the publication even of fragments of his conclusions. Mankind was to have to discover afresh what he knew already, to explore afresh the paths he had trodden and mapped, to fall into his errors after he had recognized them, to struggle out of all the traps he had evaded.
I suppose had I just read the subtitle I would have known what was coming: The Tragic Pursuit of Perfection. In scattering his efforts in shotgun fashion, rather than rifling in on and finishing work in narrower fields of thought and experimentation, da Vinci left the world a vast knowledge base, 90 percent complete in a hundred fields of endeavor, none of them completed. Even though he had a number of notable triumphs, it’s still sad.
The book is well written and informative. I bogged down some on the many Italian names—me, who grew up in Cranston, which is now designated one of the Tri-Guido Cities for its Italian influence and culture. But I did. I enjoyed the book, but doubt I’ll ever read it again. So out to the garage, to the shelves of books that will be sold or given away, it goes.