Leonardo (review)

Leonardo da Vinci inspires perennial fascination in the general public. Truckloads of books and articles have been written about him, including best-selling novels filled with factual errors and unlikely scenarios. The myth of Leonardo—lone inventive genius, centuries ahead of his time—is one that seems unlikely to fade, despite the large body of careful scholarship that exists on virtually every facet of his work and known career, and on the social and cultural context in which he lived and worked. This scholarship shows him to be brilliant, inspired, and multifaceted, yes, but also very much a man of his own era. Many idealize Leonardo without "knowing" him, despite the availability of thousands of sheets of his notebooks filled with spectacular drawings and written commentary and despite the number of extant paintings.

For whatever reasons that Leonardo functions so well as a modern icon of inventive genius, his actual writings, often cryptic and obsessed with details (e.g., how gears arranged in various ways move), are not terribly accessible in terms of comprehensibility to general readers. Leonardo provides a highly readable yet sophisticated introduction to the Renaissance master's work by a prolific scholar, art historian, and expert on the subject. As in his long out-of-print work, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man (1981), here Martin Kemp emphasizes the unity of Leonardo's thought. Leonardo contains a highly useful "gallery" of Leonardo's extant paintings and a chronology of his life. Although lacking footnotes and a formal bibliography, it does include suggestions for further reading. My one criticism is that Kemp has not footnoted his many carefully translated citations from Leonardo's notebooks, nor has he provided a much-needed appendix providing a list of the extant manuscripts, their location, and major editions. These omissions prevent the general reader from making an easy transition from this book to Leonardo's own writings.

Kemp's account of Leonardo's career—including the functioning of his workshop, his rivalries, and his noble patrons—effectively shows him to be a man of his own time. But the author also underscores the exceptional character of Leonardo's notebooks. In this unprecedented corpus, words and drawings work together to explicate a coherent system of thought. Leonardo was a "supreme visualizer" (p. 48) whose ideas were grounded in seeing real things and phenomena.

Yet Leonardo's dissections and the resulting anatomical studies were not "descriptive" in the modern sense of the word. Rather, they were functional: "[H]e was always looking at form in terms of its function within the framework of natural law" (p. 95). The human body is a small world, analogous to a machine; the artificial and the natural are fundamentally interrelated. The microcosm and macrocosm look similar and they also share the same principles of organization. Leonardo explored such precepts using multiple techniques of drawing, from exploded views to cinematic depictions of motion. Kemp shows that Leonardo's thought was far from static. He later developed a highly dynamic view, for example, of the earth and its waters, as he also attempted to devise increasingly "tight" models for processes, forms, and functions where analogy alone seemed less and less able to suffice as full explanation.

In the process of explicating the underlying unity of Leonardo's thought, Kemp provides lucid accounts of the many topics of which it is comprised, including water studies, fossils, the deluge, hydraulic engineering, and flight. Leonardo worked on a theoretical level even as he also undertook numerous utilitarian engineering projects, from canal building to fortification, and physical experiments.

Approaching Leonardo's painting through an analysis of the processes he used, Kemp elucidates both unfinished works (e.g., The Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizzi) and the recently restored ones (e.g., The Last Supper in Milan). He outlines procedures that include "conceptual and graphic brainstorming" (p. 183); mapping space using perspectival methods; the study of light; and the study of figures, including the depiction of emotions and thought especially through gestures and drapery. Kemp also...