20 Oct LEONARDO DA VINCI (ELIZABETH LUNDAY)
Leonardo left behind only a handful of paintings—fewer than twenty, with some badly damaged or incomplete. His sculptures were either unfinished or later destroyed. What we seem to have in abundance are his notebooks—some 13,000 pages—and experts believe many more notes have been lost. Even with so few artworks to judge him by, Leonardo is recognized as one of the world’s greatest artists. He is hailed as the ultimate Renaissance man, even though most people know only one of his paintings.
The myth of Leonardo rests on the Mona Lisa, a simple portrait of a woman on a balcony. The mass of tourists who crowd Paris’s Louvre Museum every year—some 8.3 million in 2006—to gaze at this mysterious work accept without question that it is the best of all paintings and that Leonardo is the greatest of all artists. So … is it? Was he?
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Leonardo was born April 15, 1452, in the small town of Vinci in the idyllic Tuscan hills, but hardly into a happy nuclear family. His parents were unwed and from different social classes; illegitimate Leo lived with his father, who married another woman. From his humble beginnings, he worked his way up the social ladder, becoming artist to kings and dukes.
About age seventeen, Leonardo apprenticed with artist Andrea del Verrochio in Florence and by 1472 was taking on his own commissions.
When Leonardo abruptly left Florence for Milan in 1482, it is tempting to think he was escaping a troubled reputation. Or it may be just anotherexample of his tendency to drift from one task to another—he did leave behind several unfinished projects and a few irked sponsors. Once in Milan, Leonardo offered his skills as a military engineer, musician, and artist to the ruling duke Ludovico Sforza. Odd combo, although apparently Leonardo was a talented lute player. Even stranger is the military-engineering claim, although at the time art and architecture were considered interchangeable, and most architects promoted their skills in fashioning defensive apparatus.
DINNER FOR THIRTEEN
Sforza seems never to have built any of Leonardo’s war machines, among them catapults, rudimentary tanks, and “fire-throwing engines.” Instead he commissioned paintings, including in 1495 The Last Supper, which takes up an entire wall of a church refectory (dining hall). Given the painting’s iconic status today, it’s hard to believe that the composition was unconventional at the time. Earlier medieval artists had typically presented Christ and his disciples as serene and untroubled. Leonardo, by contrast, chose to show the disciples’ emotional reactions to Christ’s announcement that he would be betrayed—the men gesture and exclaim, draw back in horror, and lean forward to argue.
Unfortunately, only hints of Leonardo’s original achievement remain—the painting has been irreparably damaged, mostly because of the artist’s penchant for experimentation. He disliked the technique of fresco, in which paint is applied directly onto wet plaster. Once the plaster dries, the painting cannot be retouched, making shading and blending colors difficult. So instead Leonardo decided to paint on dry, rather than wet, plaster. Bad choice. The dried plaster soon began flaking off the wall, and restorers have been trying to save the work ever since. Not to mention that in 1796 French troops threw rocks at the wall; clumsy restoration attempts in the 1800s destroyed more than they preserved; and during World War II the building was bombed. A 1999 restoration is believed to have stabilized the painting, but it remains a bit of a blur.
WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, SKIDADDLE
The Last Supper was not Leonardo’s most important assignment in Milan. More prestigious was the commission for the Gran Cavallo, a massive horse cast in bronze. Leonardo sculpted a clay model and designed frames forcasting, but the horse was never finished due in part to ever-troubled Italian politics, which cut short not only Leonardo’s efforts but Sforza’s rule as well. As French forces attacked Milan, Sforza seized the seventy tons of bronze intended for the sculpture and used it to cast cannons. The conquering French invaders used the clay horse model for target practice.
Leonardo, meanwhile, fled to Florence. There he drew up plans to alter the course of the Arno River, sketched a remarkable flying machine, and spent several months in the court of the powerful Cesare Borgia.
FROM MYSTERY TO MASTERPIECE
About 1503–6, Leonardo painted “La Gioconda” (a.k.a. the Mona Lisa), a woman with brown eyes, a wide forehead, and a round chin. She wears an elegantly pleated gown, and her hands rest on the arm of a chair. The loggia where she sits juts improbably over a precipice overlooking a vista of roads and rivers, hills, and valleys.
So what was new? First, her pose. Lisa sits turned away from the viewer but has shifted her upper body to face us. This off-axis position, a form ofcontrapposto (Italian for “opposite”), lends a sense of movement to the figure. The fantastic landscape was another innovation, since most paintings of the period had little background.
But ask most people what is distinctive about the Mona Lisa and they say the figure’s enigmatic gaze and, above all else, her “mysterious” smile. “Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa? Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?” crooned Nat King Cole in his number-one song from 1950. Lisa’s smile is slight, and her face is certainly hard to read—but none of that is unique to the Mona Lisa. Leonardo painted other women with enigmatic stares, such as Ginevra de’ Benci and many a Virgin and saint. The painting’s reputation has more to do with its history than its subject—but that’s getting ahead of the story.
In 1506, Leonardo headed back to Milan, where scientific investigations interested him more than artmaking. Seven years later he moved to Rome at the invitation of Pope Leo X, but he seemed unwilling to compete with fellow artists Michelangelo and Raphael. So in 1516 Leonardo left Italy, becoming the “king’s painter” of Francis I of France but in fact paintinglittle. His real job was to provide stimulating conversation for the king, but their scintillating discourse was cut short when Leonardo died of a stroke in 1519.
The king took possession of Leonardo’s artwork, so the Mona Lisa passed into the hands of the French crown and out of the public eye for several centuries. After the French Revolution, Napoleon took a shine to Lady Lisa and briefly had the painting moved to his bedroom at the Tuileries Palace. In 1804, the work was hung in the Louvre, a portion of the palace that was converted into a museum. Not that anyone noticed—Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s works were far more popular.
It took the interest of French Symbolist poets of the mid-nineteenth century to transform the Mona Lisa into a masterpiece. They developed a fascination with femmes fatales, women believed to be as devouring as they were beautiful, and for some reason they lumped Mona Lisa into this category. English critic Water Pater expanded this notion in 1869: “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave.”
From there, all it took to cement public fascination was theft. In 1911, a museum visitor found the Mona Lisa’s spot on the wall empty. A slipshod investigation followed, and the work was feared lost forever. Then in 1913, Vincenzo Peruggia, a former Louvre employee, contacted a Florence art dealer about selling the work. It turned out Peruggia had hidden overnight in a broom closet and snuck out the next morning with the painting stashed under his coat. Peruggia claimed his motive was a patriotic desire to return the Mona Lisa to Italy.
The recovery of the Mona Lisa was an international event, and from then on its fame was undisputable. For years, the Louvre tried to treat the work like any other painting, but museum officials finally gave in to pressure from staff to post signs directing people to the painting. It now hangs in a special exhibit space within a climate-controlled, bulletproof enclosure. Not bad for a simple portrait painted by a man who rarely finished anything.
Secret Lives of Great Artists
Elizabeth Lunday
