NO man is a hero to his valet or his biographer, and Charles Nicholl, in this bright, cunning, intrepidly intelligent biographical
study, has startlingly demystified his enigmatic subject. Nineteenth-century historians canonized Leonardo as a universal intelligence, the embodiment of the superhuman aspiration that impelled the Renaissance. In The Reckoning, Nicholl examined the career of another reckless spiritual rebel, Christopher Marlowe, entangling this Faustian transgressor in a sordid Elizabethan underworld of thuggery, buggery and treason. He has done something equally brisk and disrespectful to Leonardo.
It’s true, as his subtitle concedes, that Leonardo nurtured an Icarus-like dream of flight, designing a velocopter and studying bat wings as a prototype for a manned flying machine. Nevertheless, Nicholl grounds him. Flight, he argues, is not necessarily the Renaissance man’s desire to reclaim equality with the angels; it may also signify, as it does for the rest of us, a fugitive longing to evade responsibility and interrupt work — “flights semantically referrable to as fleeing rather than flying”.
He begins with Leonardo, near the end of his life, scrawling an impatient ‘etcetera’ on a sheet of geometrical notes as he abandons the labour of cogitation. The soup, Leonardo adds to explain his impatience, is getting cold. Nicholl enjoys the grubby, humanizing domestic detail; it doesn’t occur to him that Leonardo might have been about to formulate the second law of thermodynamics.
Occasionally, Nicholl allows Leonardo to enjoy a moment of sublimated mental triumph, as when he stands on top of Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence, elated by “the precisely calibrated magic which could throw up this gravity-defying structure halfway to heaven”.
But, for the most part, averse to hagiography and to what he calls “Leonardolatry”, Nicholl seeks out lowly explanations for his subject’s almost maniacal creativity. Thus, his output of ‘written material’, secretively scribbled back to front with the aid of a mirror, loses its arcane obsessiveness and is treated as a hangover from the dreary trade of his father, who was a notary — “the inscriber of transactions, the official noter-down”.
The avian thinker is implicated with the jumped-up warlords who ran Italy during his lifetime. Leaving Florence for Milan, Nicholl’s Leonardo ingratiates with the Sforza clan. He paints portraits of their concubines (like the sleek, pampered “Lady with an Ermine”) and sketches tanks, mortars and bombards to be used in their military campaigns. Later, he places his engineering skills at the service of Machiavelli. When the French king vaingloriously rides into the city he had conquered, Nicholl is dismayed to find Leonardo stage-managing the victory parade. Even worse is his employment as a trivial court-jester, dreaming up quizzical party-pieces and punning cryptograms for his patrons.
The change of emphasis is bracing and Nicholl writes with keen excitement about Leonardo’s anatomical investigations, conducted by messily dissected and putrid corpses sometimes scavenged from the gallows. He is also thrilled by the diagrams of water, in which Leonardo struggles to comprehend the chaotic flux of created nature. But when he comes to the iconic works venerated by the 19th century — “The Last Supper”, “Mona Lisa” — he develops a blind spot; he is even reluctant to use the word “masterpiece”, which he calls “a subjective and ultimately unhelpful term”. His demystifying zeal is at its harshest when he
reviews the scholarly debate about the identity of the half-smiling siren in Mona Lisa. He reviews various fantastical efforts to solve the
mystery, then asks: “Is there really any mystery to solve?” For him, there’s no question that the subject is an obscure and comfortingly ordinary Florentine housewife.
He goes on to quote the entranced prose-poem in which Walter Pater hinted at the Mona Lisa’s vampirish sexual rapacity, but dismisses the