Book Review: Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinciby Walter IsaacsonSimon and Schuster, 2017The first thing any reader is going to notice about Leonardo Da Vinci, the latest book from bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson, is also the first thing Leonardo himself – fastidious, perfectionist, and more than a little vain – would have noticed: this is a singularly beautiful physical production. The entire thing is printed on heavy stock paper which highlights the high-detail artwork that runs throughout the book instead of only in the customary 10-page inset. The book opens with a four-page full-color timeline of Leonardo's life, illustrated in artwork-landmarks from his career as a painter, and that overview leads readers to 600 pages in which, fittingly, that artwork is never far from the reading eyes. The book is heavy in the hand, like some brass-bound codex from Leonardo's own day.This impressive interior design, by Paul Dippolito, matches to an obviously intentional degree the biographical strategy adopted by Isaacson throughout, which is to invite readers to engage with his famous subject on the human level, slipping past the oversized legend as much as possible. This is more difficult with Leonardo than with virtually any other figure in the last 500 years, and that difficulty started early, as Isaacson himself notes, quoting the worshipful Vasari: “Sometimes, in supernatural fashion, a single person is marvelously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that his every act is divine and everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human art.”Isaacson wants to go backstage behind this legend (a legend very much encouraged by Leonardo himself) and convey the man himself: brilliant, yes, but with many of the odd and ungainly turns of brilliance that tend to be found in autodidacts. Imaginative, yes, but with the interpersonal tone-deafness the very imaginative often display to the ordinary people all around them. Bold in his conceptions, but absolutely dependent on adulation in order to summon the will to see them through to completion.Despite the reliable presence of hagiographies in any publishing season, this fallible, mercurial Leonardo has been extremely well-served by biographers, from Serge Bramly's magisterial volume of thirty years ago to Charles Nicholl's fascinating Leonardo Da Vinci: Flights of the Mind to Jean-Pierre Isabouts' Young Leonardo and Mike Lankford's brilliant Becoming Leonardo, both from earlier this year. Isaacson has made a name for himself with a huge swath of the reading public by writing big biographies of pivotal figures in the history of science and technology – his book on Einstein was critically praised, and his life of Steve Jobs is one of the greatest biographies to appear in English so far in the 21^st century – but he himself warns his readers that there was always more to Leonardo than the lifelong passionate amateur in the newborn fields of science, just as there was more to him than the lifelong painter and sculptor. The link isn't so much art or science as innovation.And yet, even an optimistic reader might wonder if there's really anything a new biography can do that hasn't been done many, many times before. The twist in these pages is the subtle but persistent preference Isaacson shows for the older Leonardo, the weathered genius who eventually saw through the wastes and obsessions of his younger years. Isaacson doesn't do this so much through page-count emphasis – all periods of his subject's life are covered with equal and impressive thoroughness – so much as through shading and shadowing. He succumbs, for instance, to a mild version of the Vasari hyperventilation when he tells us that Leonardo's goal in life was “nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world,” but when he attempts to qualify things slightly, he almost always begins with some variation on the same three words:

As he aged, he pursued his scientific inquiries not just to serve his art but out of a joyful instinct to fathom the profound beauties of creation. When he groped for a theory of why the sky appears blue, it was not simply to inform his paintings. His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully fanatical.

The note of course is one of age, of mortality. And later, when Isaacson is indulging in one of his many delightful meditations on the deeper meanings of Leonardo's aesthetic fixations, we get variations on that same theme actually bracketing a fascinating look at the role of categorical transformation in Leonardo's imagination:

Throughout his life, Leonardo would remain enchanted by the transformation of shapes. The margins of his notebooks, and sometimes entire pages, would be filled with triangles inside semicircles inside squares inside circles as he played with tricks for turning one geometrical form into another with the same area or volume. He came up with169 formulas for squaring a circular shape, and on one sheet drew so many examples that it looks like a page from a pattern book. Even on the very last notebook page that he is known to have written near the end of his life – a famous one ending with the phrase “the soup is getting cold” – is filled with triangles and rectangles as he tried to calculate comparable areas.

This, then, is a Leonardo almost at odds with the energetic brilliance of the book's own pages, a life of Da Vinci written from the end backwards, as it were. Isaacson creates a complexly haunted Leonardo, a more compelling version of the character in the round than has appeared in almost a century, since Rachel Annand Taylor's Leonardo the Florentine. The pioneering genius four centuries ahead of his time is very much alive and astounding in these pages, very much the predictable kind of Leonardo who appears in biographies every year. But there's another Leonardo here, a figure who worries and causes worry, a titan of daring but also doubt, a superman for the post-everything age in which, it turns out, he was living all along.