Leonardo (review)

The 2011 edition of Martin Kemp’s Leonardo differs little from the 2004 edition in its sage discussion of Leonardo’s methods and unique genius for observation of nature and application of his formidable intellect to engineering problems and pioneering research in so many fields of Renaissance endeavor. This edition features the same six chapters: 1 “A Strange Career”; 2 “Looking”; 3 “Body and Machine”; 4 “The Living Earth”; 5 “Telling Tales”; and 6 “Lisa’s Room, with appendices and a considerable number of fine plates and figures. Testimony to Kemp’s far-reaching grasp of Leonardo’s world are his peerless analyses of the master’s mathematical sensibilities, spatial reasoning, and logic of biological economy. Few scholars in the world are as conversant as Kemp with Leonardo’s scientific observation and incomparable ability to deduce working principles for his keenly inventive imagination and discoveries, let alone his creative influence on the subsequent visual world. Out of great respect for Kemp’s own lifelong body of scholarship, many of his peers have stayed out of a new fray developing since 2008, a small but vital crux to the new 2011 edition of Kemp’s Leonardo. The rationale for the 2011 edition seems mostly to follow from only a few pages (210–211) added to the original publication and this is where a vexing problem lies at the heart of a debate over a new Leonardo attribution championed by Kemp, whose prior vast work on Leonardo is almost entirely unassailable.

In his “Note to the 2011 edition” (xiii), Kemp lays out the 2011 edition’s rationale, including new evidence about the starting date for Mona Lisa, a new detail of Leonardo’s early work as a sculptor in Verrocchio’s workshop, and recovery of the duke of Buccleuch’s stolen 1501–1507 Madonna of the Yarn-winder that Leonardo painted with his pupils. But these are not Kemp’s top priorities in his note to the 2011 edition. While Kemp also introduces the reappearance of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi (1504–1507) as another reason for the new edition, his primary argument opens, “This new edition has been triggered by two newly discovered and fully authentic works of art by Leonardo, the first to appear for over a century.” Without criticizing the 2011 book in any other way, some of his colleagues fear Kemp is more than a bit glib in the use of “fully authenticated,” especially in reference to one of the works in question. This is the so-called La Bella Principessa, held by Kemp to be a unique portrait of Bianca Sforza, the illegitimate daughter of Ludovico (“il Moro”) Sforza, who died in 1496 after a young adolescent wedding to Galeazzo Sanseverino in the same year. This Leonardo attribution was laid out and stoutly defended in Kemp’s 2010 volume coauthored with Pascal Cotte, La Bella Principessa, the Profile Portrait of a Milanese Woman: the Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci. Yet this attribution has been hotly debated and a cause of some acrimony across the Renaissance art world. Kemp has provided some credible evidence for his strong position—e.g., expected left-handed hatching, the appropriate garb and Milanese period portrait style, the near perfect execution of anatomy, hair and textiles so like other Leonardo drawings, and a possible but inconclusive Leonardo fingerprint (despite much digital and forensic high resolution imaging). But the evidence to date has not been entirely convincing in laying to rest serious professional doubts about the small (33 × 22 cm) mostly chalk (with ink and wash tint) portrait on vellum as being by Leonardo. That Leonardo has no other known vellum portraits in chalk medium is only one feature that would make this small portrait without precedent. Kemp can partly counter this lack of precedent with the circumstantial fact that Leonardo expressed written intent to ask contemporary French artist Jean Perréal (who passed through Milan in 1494 with the armies of Charles VIII) about dry coloring technique. Similarities also found in 2010 with other vellum portraits...