Leonardo Da Vinci: An Untraceable Life

The surfeit of biographies about Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) has helped create a “cult” of the Italian Renaissance painter that upholds some of Western culture’s “most cherished myths,” according to this erudite study. Campbell (The Endless Periphery), a professor of art history at Johns Hopkins University, contends that art museums, TV, and other forms of popular culture project an artificially coherent image of da Vinci as an individualistic and “intellectually daring” artist. In reality, most of the biographical data available is fragmentary, and when pieced together it reveals a life story full of paradoxes. As Campbell writes, da Vinci was both “an artist legible in his civic milieu” of Florentine and a cultural nomad; a painter and sculptor deeply enmeshed in the collaborative world of the workshop who guarded against “creative contamination”; and a close observer who fastidiously attended to the body “as a marvelous machine of nature,” but evidenced a detachment from his own (he likely never painted a self-portrait). In making salient points about the ways in which da Vinci’s life and work have been used to support notions of male genius and European cultural supremacy, Campbell interrogates how the modern biography frames the past to “legitimize” contemporary values and cultural myths. Buttressed by scrupulous research and extensive knowledge of its subject’s milieu, this is a thought-provoking reconsideration of an artistic giant and his legacy. Illus. (Feb.)