Leonardo: A Restless Genius by Antonio Forcellino (review)

With this volume Antonio Forcellino completes a trilogy of biographies detailing the lives of the most notable artists of the Italian Renaissance—Michelangelo Buonarotti (Italian edition, Laterza, 2005; English translation, Polity, 2009), Raphael Sanzio (Laterza, 2006; Polity, 2012), and Leonardo da Vinci (Laterza, 2016; Polity, 2018). As an eminent restorer of art works from this period as well as an accomplished art historian, Forcellino devotes expert attention in these biographies not only to the stylistic and cultural features of his subjects' creations but also to the technical and financial aspects of their productions in a way that casts many of their works in a new light.

The present biography of Leonardo, like its two predecessors mentioned above, is a scholarly book aimed at the non-specialist. Notes are provided at relevant points to document important claims and to direct the interested reader to more detailed research, but the writing is always lively and combines the imaginative reconstruction of evocative scenes with more factually grounded descriptions.

As an organizing principle for Leonardo's biography, Forcellino takes the artist's illegitimate birth to a peasant girl as the fundamental determinant of his life's work. Leonardo's father, a prosperous Florentine notary, never accepted him into the family and left him in the country to receive only a rudimentary education. This circumstance distinguishes Leonardo from the great and much more productive polymath of the previous generation, Leon Battista Alberti, who was similarly born out of wedlock but whose father raised him and ensured that he was formally educated according to humanist principles.

Paternal rejection, Forcellino argues, prompted Leonardo to devote his life to pursuing an ever-increasing number of fields of inquiry, none of which he could ever fully master, in a futile attempt to position himself as the most outstanding practitioner of all the known arts (as well as some not yet known, such as human flight). Hence the original Italian subtitle of this work, genio senza pace, implies much more than the translated phrase 'a restless genius', which suggests a person of outstanding abilities who is always active. Genio senza pace also suggests a mind that can never be at peace, one that is always dissatisfied because of the impossible quest it has set for itself. This is a plausible thesis, interestingly elaborated, but not to the point of being fully persuasive.

Despite Leonardo's dissatisfaction with the outcome of many of his efforts, or his loss of interest in them once some challenging technical problem had been solved in the preparatory stage, leading him to abandon them while incomplete, he nevertheless displayed 'excessive self-confidence' at the beginning of each new project, an enthusiasm that 'would constantly lead him to embark on endeavours he was unable to complete' (p. 111). Toward the end of his life, his reputation for leaving work unfinished was such that during his time in Rome (1513–17), having been invited there by Giuliano de' Medici, brother of Pope Leo X, he was given no important commissions by the Pope, but was relegated to artisans' quarters and assigned tasks such as the production of mirrors.

Notwithstanding the possible overreach of the author's illegitimacy hypothesis, the narrative exposition in this work is compelling and the analysis of Leonardo's art works, both the finished and the unfinished ones, is always informative. The discussion of how Leonardo transcended many of the conventions of Florentine panel art through the manipulation of light and shade in his monochrome preparatory drawings makes it clear that he presented 'a very new combination of [colour] tone and light' in his works (p. 123). As a result, 'Leonardo paints with shadow what all the others paint with colour' (p. 123).

One note of caution, however: because the book's interweaving of a cultural and historical narrative with its artistic and technical discussions is so skilful, and these latter discussions are so impressive, the reader may be misled by some...