Because Walter Isaacson has
made a cottage industry of writing about Renaissance men, it’s no surprise,
really, that he’s finally landed on a subject from the actual Renaissance. Like
the other idols in Isaacson’s gallery of polymaths and visionaries — Albert
Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs — Leonardo da Vinci was born with extra
bundles of receptors, attuned to frequencies his peers could not hear and
capable of making connections no one else could see, especially between the
sciences and the humanities.
There is a significant
difference, though, between “Leonardo da Vinci” and Isaacson’s previous
biographies. His other geniuses left behind bountiful source material about the
lives they led. Leonardo did not. There are, famously, 7,200 pages of his glorious
notebooks to work from, and yes, they are rich in maps, doodles, anatomical
drawings, schema for new machines, models for new weapons, proposals for city
redesigns, geometric patterns, portraits, eddies, swirls, curls, pensées,
scientific observations of uncanny prescience. (Among the most staggering: He
intuited the first and third laws of motion, 200 years ahead of Newton.)
But what Leonardo’s
notebooks lack — which Isaacson readily concedes — are “intimate personal
revelations.” Some biographers are perfectly comfortable composing a full-body
portrait based solely on a few faint footprints. (Consider the legions who have
tackled Shakespeare.) Isaacson does not seem to be that kind of writer. Absent
the documentary material he’s accustomed to, he overcompensates with copious
analyses of Leonardo’s works.
I’m not sure the role of
art critic suits him. Isaacson’s enthusiasm is admirable, but he hails many of
Leonardo’s creations in the same breathless tone with which a teenager might
greet a new Apple product. The words “brilliant,” “wondrous” and “ingenious”
come up a lot. It is not atypical to find a sentence like this one, describing
Leonardo’s notebooks: “They allow us to marvel at the beauty of a universal
mind as it wanders exuberantly in free-range fashion over the arts and sciences
and, by doing so, senses the connections in our cosmos.”
As an art historian,
Isaacson falls prey to the excesses of the profession, adopting the oracular
tone of a museum docent — “the landscape of her soul and of nature’s soul are
intertwined,” he writes of the Mona Lisa — and spending pages on questions of
interest to a select few, like whether the original drawing of “Virgin and
Child With Saint Anne” did or did not include the lamb. In these places, he’s
not just missing the forest for the trees. He’s seeing only bark.
Isaacson is stronger when
he’s on familiar turf, showing us Leonardo the scientist and innovator, the
engineer and secret doctor . Between 1508 and 1513, Leonardo skinned at least
20 cadavers, some as they were decomposing in his hands, in order to study and
draw muscle groups, organs, skeins of veins. His analysis of the human body was
so thorough that he determined how the aortic valve worked 450 years before the
medical establishment did. (“Of all the amazements that Leonardo left for the
ages,” the surgeon Sherwin Nuland said, “this one would seem to be the most
extraordinary.”)
I should mention here that
Isaacson’s book includes dozens of color illustrations, all ravishing.
Isaacson is at his finest
when he analyzes what made Leonardo human. He was an inveterate deadline
misser, more beguiled by starting projects than finishing them. He abandoned a 23-foot
equestrian statue intended for a prince; he gave up on paintings and murals
intended for wealthy patrons; he sketched “flying machines that never flew,
tanks that never rolled, a river that was never diverted.”
One of his most underrated
achievements may have been his eloquent defense of procrastination. “Men of
lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he told one
of his employers, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the
perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”
Leonardo was an implacable
perfectionist. (“He saw faults even in the things that to others seemed
miracles,” wrote an early biographer.) He worked on the Mona Lisa for 16 years,
and it was in his bedroom when he died.
Like many artists,
Leonardo’s weaknesses were inseparable from his strengths. If he hadn’t been an
easily distracted perfectionist, he would have left behind a larger official
oeuvre but a less impressive one. Instead, he abandoned what he could not work
out, which allowed him to “go down in history as an obsessed genius rather than
merely a reliable master painter,” Isaacson writes.
One often associates
perfectionism with a toxic variety of neurosis. Yet Leonardo seemed quite
well-adjusted, particularly for an artist. Unlike Michelangelo, who was dour
and self-denying, Leonardo was generous and convivial, partial to robes of purple
and pink. He wasn’t especially competitive. He didn’t spend his days spoiling
for a fight. (He was no Caravaggio.) He was comfortably open about being gay
(Michelangelo was not), merrily indulging his longtime companion with enough
shoes and jeweled stockings to keep even Imelda Marcos in clover.
And he was strikingly
devoid of ego, “more interested in pursuing knowledge than in publishing it,”
Isaacson writes. “He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for
his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for
himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history.”
In recent years, there’s
been a glut of books about the so-called science of creativity, which in truth
are TED lectures in waiting, motivational business books that instruct us on
how to unleash our own inner Leonardos. The pleasure of an Isaacson biography
is that it doesn’t traffic in such cynical stuff; the author tells stories of
people who, by definition, are inimitable.
Yet in the conclusion of
“Leonardo da Vinci,” Isaacson capitulates to the easy seductions of TED-ism,
and boy is it disappointing. Under the subheading of “Learning From Leonardo,”
he offers 20 italicized platitudes, including Retain a childlike sense of
wonder and Let your reach exceed your grasp. Each gets its own elaboration.
None is especially helpful. It’s all about as cloying as canned peaches. Though
perhaps I’m just too old to Be open to mystery.
What endures after reading
“Leonardo da Vinci” is just how indifferent to glory the man was. He lived in a
world of his private obsessions. He often despaired over his failure to get
anything done. (“Tell me if ever I did a thing,” he wrote in his notebooks.)
What a gift that he did; what a gift that we know him at all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/books/review-leonardo-da-vinci-biography-walter-isaacson.html
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario