Leonardo da Vinci: Flights Of The Mind

Rating:
Summary: THE Renaissance Man
Review: There was a TV series that aired on CBS in the Seventies about the life of Leonardo. I remember it made me feel excited about the possibilities of learning, discovering, and creating. For years, I searched for the series on video tape and finally found it unexpectedly in a fabulous art supply store called Flax, in San Francisco. Watching it again gave me the same feeling that anything is possible. Reading Charles Nicholls's new biography of Leonardo gave me a similar feeling.

I have never understood the people who criticize Leonardo for starting so many things and not finishing them. If we knew only of the works he had finished, we would still consider him a genius. Perhaps abandoning a venture that he didn't consider worth finishing freed him up for an even better project. Maybe he kept his mind sharp by flitting from one thing to another. If he were alive today, I have no doubt that we would cure his attention deficit disorder with drugs.

Charles Nicholls is a careful biographer and qualifies all his conclusions about Leonardo. This is probably wise when dealing with a subject who lived five hundred years ago. Still, Nicholls is straightforward concerning Leonardo's relationships with his students and others.

In addition to the usual stories of Leonardo's fascination with nature as a boy and his failure to build a giant bronze equestrian statue, Nicholls has some new information. We find out what kind of jokes Leonardo told and that he was a vegetarian for the last half of his life. Nicholls includes Freud's speculations on Leonardo's relationships with his parents and the effect that may have played in the composition of his paintings.

But Nicholls sticks mostly to primary sources for his information, including Leonardo's many notebooks and letters. Although Leonardo was a private man who wrote all his notes in a peculiar backwards "mirror writing," possibly to keep people from easily deciphering them, he wrote about everything, from how to prepare pigments for a fresco to how to keep healthy and clean (freshen your hands with rose water to smell pleasant). So even though Leonardo lived long ago and there are still mysteries about him, with Nicholls's biography we can get a pretty good idea of what Leonardo was like as an artist, and as a man.



Rating:
Summary: Flights of the Mind indeed
Review: This book is one of the best biographies that I have read. The author tells a lot about Leonardo's art and the way he went about to produce it. Additionally, one gets a good idea of the man Leonardo was - brilliant, but (like all of us) plagued by self-doubt. I highly recommend this book. The only drawback of the book is that the author refers to many paintings and sculptures that are not illustrated.