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Leonardo: The Artist and the Man

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Serge Bramly is a man of his word. The subtitle of this book is "The Artist And The Man," and that is what we get, in a very evenhanded account. There are many fascinating anecdotes and tidbits concerning both the work and the personality of Leonardo. My favorite story concerned the painting of "The Last Supper." Mr. Brambly explains that Leonardo liked to base his figures on real people. He strolled the streets of Milan and sketched many faces in order to come up with the models for Christ's disciples. It was smooth sailing until he tried to find someone "evil" looking enough to base Judas on. Apparently Leonardo dragged his feet on completing the fresco for a year while he searched for "his Judas." The prior of the convent who was keeping tabs on the notoriously slow-working Leonardo finally complained to the Duke of Milan regarding the delay. Called in front of the Duke to explain himself, Leonardo had this to say: "...I have been going every day to the Borghetto, where Your Excellency knows that all the ruffians of the city live. But I have not yet been able to discover a villain's face corresponding to what I have in mind. Once I find that face, I will finish the painting in a day. But if my research remains fruitless, I shall take the features of the prior who came to complain about me to Your Excellency and who would fit the requirements perfectly. But I have been hesitating a long time whether to make him a figure of ridicule in his own convent." In this quote, we get an idea of both Leonardo's working method and his sense of humor. (The Duke, by the way, was delighted by this reply and took Leonardo's side in the matter.) It is impossible to convey the richness of this book in a short review, but Mr. Bramly manages to convey the richness of his subject in what, at 400 pages, is a relatively brief biography. The author discusses Leonardo's famous "mirror writing" and states that it was not an attempt to conceal what he was writing, as Leonardo's notebooks were workbooks rather than diaries. Mr. Brambly says that left-handed people commonly can write from right to left. (I am not an expert and cannot judge this assertion.). The author also discusses Leonardo's homosexuality, his proposed inventions, his forays into architecture and civil engineering, his insatiable curiosity (he performed over two dozen dissections to teach himself anatomy, as well as learning Latin and mathematics in middle-age), and even his diet (Leonardo came to believe in the sanctity of all life, not just human life, and became a vegetarian). Mr. Bramly is not blind to his subject's faults: Leonardo was to some extent lazy (he hated to get up in the morning...something many of us can identify with!); he started many projects but completed very few (he was more interested in the conception than in the completion, plus his mind tended to wander from topic to topic); and he seemed to be pretty much disconnected from "real life" and other people and lost in his dreams and work. A bonus of the book is that Mr. Bramly gives wonderful descriptions of some of the famous people whose paths crossed Leonardo's, such as Cesare Borgia and King Francois I of France. I also can't say enough good things about the quality of the translation from French to English done by Sian Reynolds. There is not one clunky sentence in the entire book. The book is also peppered with many interesting reproductions (mostly black-and-white, but a few color), including an alternate, nude, version of "The Mona Lisa!" Many sketches from Leonardo's notebooks are included, as well. I came away from this book knowing a lot more about Leonardo's work and personality. When this work was first published in Great Britain in the early 1990's it was selected as one of the best books of the year by "The Sunday Times." It's not difficult to see why.

"Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death." These are the words of Leonardo da Vinci, and according to the author, Serge Bramly, would have made the best epitaph for him. What is staggering about Leonardo is not just the volume of what filled his days, but the amazing range of pursuits that filled them. And this must pose a unique challenge to his biographers - a challenge Bramly rises to beautifully. As the title suggests, the primary focus of the book is on art. Bramly examines Leonardo's paintings from technical and aesthetic standpoints, as well as psychologically analyzing the paintings. He cites others who previously did such analysis, including Freud himself. The passages concerning the paintings are simply some of the most enjoyable art history I've read. What is most remarkable is that gradually an image of Leonardo the man emerges through his art. Leonardo's other pursuits (military engineer, city planner, architect, sculptor, anatomist, inventor, to name but some) are also of great interest of course. In these areas, Bramly devotes much space to examining the famous notebooks of Leonardo, and I can say that I have a much better understanding as to the significance and nature of these notebooks than before. The biographical details of Leonardo's life also prove to be quite entertaining. A virtual Who's Who of Renaissance Italy parades through his life, and Bramly gives us an idea of the sort of relationships Leonardo had with them as well as with his own family. Some of the terrain of Leonardo's life is difficult to traverse, his illegitimacy, his homosexuality, his failure to complete so much of what he started, and these issues are dealt with in a straightforward, honest fashion. Bramly's doesn't follow as strict a timeline as most biographies do; he skips around the years quite a bit. But I think this is necessary given Leonardo's wide range of pursuits. He never worked on just one project at a time, and the fact that Bramly follows these pursuits rather than a strict timeline makes the book more coherent than it would be otherwise. There are dozens of black & white illustrations throughout the book, as well as eight pages of color illustrations of some of his more notable paintings. I think that probably 4 pages should be added to the color illustrations. Among the paintings that should be, but are not, shown in color are the Mona Lisa, St. John the Baptist, and the Turin self-portrait. But that's a minor complaint (and one directed more at the publishers than the author). In short, this biography takes a mythical figure and shows him as a man; it takes the miracle of his paintings and other lifework and makes it comprehensible as being the work of that man. The resulting picture is that of a man whose life was more amazing and inspiring than any myth or miracle.

The author of this book does a great job in writing this book such that it is fluid and readable without becoming bogged down in dates, details, and other hard to track minutiae. However, if research level detail, in depth analysis and commentary are required, then take a pass on this one as, at best, it can only be used to corroborate facts from other sources.

It also seems as if the author is resisting the tempation to avoid writing his book in such a way that it does not seem to be a hagiography, but unfortunately his efforts falter and crack throughout the book.

In summary, this is a good book for those with a passing interest in Leonardo, or in the period, as it is very readable. But for those looking for research material, this is not the book for you. The book "Leonardo da Vinci, Scientist, Inventor, Artist" by Otto Letze and Thomas Buchsteiner would be more suitable for such a task.

It's been a while since I read this book, but I wanted to write the review to spread the word that this is a fascinating biography, well worth reading. If you're a da Vinci expert, I don't know how much this will add to your knowledge, but for a painter and generalist like me, the art criticism, biography, and historical context were perfectly balanced. Da Vinci was more than just a visionary genius; he was a genuinely charming and hilarious guy. If there's anyone from the past I could meet, it would probably be he. And if there's anyone from the past who I wish could see the modern world, again it would be da Vinci, because his intellectual curiosity would have been so vindicated by what modern science has to offer. While da Vinci was too preoccupied with other projects to concentrate on painting for much of his career, he created a small number of paintings so profound that they have never been surpassed. Personally, I prefer his secular portraits to all others -- ah to have looked over his shoulder while he painted the magnificent Ginevra de' Benci or the Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with the Ermine)! Unfortunately, and I seriously doubt this is due to a defect in research, there isn't that much information available about da Vinci's emotional life, so the author makes careful but limited extrapolations based on fact. I love biography because it's the next best thing to meeting fascinating people, and it doesn't get much better than this.

The other reviewers of this work have provided a good idea of what to expect, so I will confine my comments to only one aspect of this biography, the one which I found the most informative and fascinating: The manner in which Leonardo was trained and educated. The greatest service Serge Bramly provides in this work is a full, three dimensional portrait of what "education" was all about in the Renaissance. What comes through quite clearly is that while Leonardo Da Vinci was certainly a possessor of that rare combination of brilliant intellect and tremendous talent, what he became - the person who remains in Western history the epitome of "genius" - was the result of how he was trained. The Northern Italy of Brunaleschi, Verrochio, Da Vinci, Rafael, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and so many others was no historical accident. They were educated and trained in such a comprehensive manner that they realized that all knowledge was not only useful, but that it all related - and was therefore interesting.

Bramly postulates that when the very young Leonardo first came to Verrochio's workshop, the first thing he saw was the master working on a problem that required a knowledge of mathematics, geometry, engineering and physics: The design and construction of an over six foot diameter bronze sphere with cross on top, weighing over a ton, which had to be transported from its place of casting and construction to the principal cathedral of Florence, lifted over 250 feet in the air, attached to the top of "Il Duomo" and secured in such a manner that it would never topple even when buffeted by the strongest storm winds. As Bramly aptly points out, there was no such thing as "art for arts' sake" back then, the concept never even having occurred to these artists because they would have considered it absurd. The same as any scientist or engineer of the day would never have dreamed of a life or world without art. All knowledge and all skills related to one another.

When Leonardo learned to draw and paint, he had to learn how to create pencils and brushes from scratch, to find and understand the properties of the raw materials from which to grind the pigments for his paints, how to work with wood and cloth so as to create a canvass. Those things alone involve the fields of geology, physics, biology (the various types of animal hairs suitable for brushes), carpentry +. The composition of his works required an in depth study of geometry, trigonometry and some degree of calculus; the faithful execution of living subjects a knowledge of anatomy and the physics of light. Each thing lead to another, and Da Vinci followed all of these paths of scientific and artistic discovery - which for him and others of his day were one and the same. This hands-on type of training in all things relevant to his trade - which meant just about all things - is what lead Da Vinci to be interested in so many diverse fields of study. The more dots he connected, the more dots he discovered that needed connecting.

All of this stands in stark contrast to how we educate people today: On career paths to ever more finite fields of specialization, excluding and discarding anything and everything that does not relate to that narrow path. The vast majority of dots are excluded, so it is no wonder why so few people know how to connect them.

So read and imbibe the training of this genius and his contemporaries. Then compare, for example, what Alan Blum said in his provocative and controversial "Closing of the American Mind;" John Ralston Saul's take on our age of the enshrinement of the idiot-savant in "Voltaire's Bastards;" or Robert Hughes' short, enjoyable but nevertheless stinging critique of our times in "Culture of Complaint." Then also consider that in the eighteenth century in the English colonies of North America there existed more or less contemporaneously a Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison and so many others. Like with North Italy during the Renaissance, it was no historical accident. If you sat at the dinner table of any of these men, it would be not just normal but expected for you to converse intelligently on topics as diverse as politics, philosophy, economics, history, agriculture, horticulture, architecture, physics, biology, botany. And to recite a few memorized poems, create puns, match wits, play a musical instrument and perhaps compose a piece or two for entertainment. Their training, likewise, was one which taught that all knowledge was important, interrelated and was interesting.

In sum, in my mind Bramly's greatest achievement in this work was to show that Da Vinci's don't just fall out of the sky. They are taught, and they are taught and trained in a very broad, inclusive manner. Would that we could return to the basics of that type of education instead of the super-specialist who excludes all else. Da Vinci's type brought us the wonders of the Renaissance. Our "modern" methodology has brought us the type of individual whose arrogance is inversely proportional to the narrowness of his knowledge, the kind who create meticulously planned and detailed exercises that inevitably become disasters, like Viet Nam, Serbia's "ethnic cleansing" and today's Iraq. Devote an individual's education to a particular species of tree and he'll want to cut down all the others to get to the one he knows the most about. But teach people about forests, and they'll be interested in all the trees - and see how each is important in its own right as well as its importance to the whole.

This book is more than a simple biography. Mr Bramly writes about his subject with such warmth and familiarity that you forget this is all based on meticulous research, that our subject died nearly 500 years ago and that only a small portion of his art, inventions and writings remain. Far from a dry "birth to death" review, this book has succeeded in bringing the multi-faceted genious that is Leonardo to life - not as an unaccessable giant but as a dreamer, inventer, loyal son, adventurer, self-educated scholar, perfectionist ... all the while possessing of a tortured soul. This is by far one of the most readable and well written biographies I have read and I applaud Mr Bramly for writing such a scholarly information-pacted page turner.

I turned to this books to get a second opinion on Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code." I found this book very helpful in dispelling some of the myths that Brown advocates, such as the nature of the two "Virgin Of The Rocks," the mysterious knife in "The Last Supper," and several hypothesis of "The Mona Lisa."

By the way, there is no mention of the Priory of Sion.

Bramly is very engaging. He can tell a tale that grips you. I suggest reading the first chapter about DaVinci's wizened self-portrait. The whole books reads like it. Admittedly, he read emotions into DaVinci that we cannot verify. This is no different that what Steven Ambose or Fawn M. Brodie have done with their biographies. It helps the presentation of the material, even if fudges the facts a bit. People do have emotional lives, and we would react similarly in similar situations.

Another of Bramly's strengths is that he puts DaVinci's life in the context of Renaissance Italy. The Boot was very different than today, made up of the independent city-states. It was the milieu that Machiavelli wrote about in "The Prince." It was among these warring princes, and DaVinci's patronage by the Medic family that helped underwrite his famous works. DaVinci's life is almost a political thriller and he moves from city-state to city-state and mingling with the great men.

Other reviews have commented on this books scanty biography material, and the many diversion into politics and so forth. This is because we have so few detail's about DaVinci's day-to-day life. We do not have the usual memories, diaries, and documents that we would have for a contemporar5y person. All we have are the notebooks, the biography made a few years after DaVinci's death, and the masterworks themselves. To his credit, Bramly works around this paucity of material in such a way that you do not notice it.

This book has B&W images from his astounding notebooks, and several pages of color inserts. There is only one flaw-the Mona Lisa is one of the images in B&W. This is more than a shame, and I hope it can be corrected in future editions.

Bramly devotes a hefty section dealing with DaVinci's homosexuality. He also includes some rather graphic images from his notebooks, and a rudely funny homage to the male member. Parents who home school their children may want to use another biography of DaVinci, since this material is college level.

I recommend this book. His has the right vide and fell for DaVinci's life and history. I think one of his best moments what when he made a connection between Massacio's painting of the inverted Peter being crucified, and the Virtuvian Man. After tracking down the images on the internet, I was dumbfounded about how right he was. Thank-you Bramly.

Translated from the French (the translation is fairly well done and readable), this is a good general bio of Leonardo's life. A primer rather than an in depth artistic analysis, it's geared towards the general reader and it does a fine job at that.

Da Vinci's life is followed from his small town upbringing by a father who was a notary (in the European sense not the American) and hence held a status higher than the average peasant or townsman.

Serge Bramly attempts some psychoanalysis of Da Vinci and if there is a main weakness to the book in my opinion it is that. His explanation of art workshops in the Renaissance era is interesting and informative. To be commended is his description of Da Vinci's relationships with his workers, friends and family. But best of all is Bramly's explanation of the relationships between the nobility who financed his projects and Da Vinci.

An informative and enjoyable biography; Leonardo: The Artist and the Man is worth a read.

This was the first of four Leonardo bios I've read and it is still the best for its distillation of the turbulent events in this paradigmatic genius' life. In a readable way it touches upon the amazing breadth of L's interests while keeping the temptation to psychological explanations to a minimum. In discovering Leonardo one must contend with at least three different Leonardos--mainly those creations of Renaissance painter/historian Giorgio Vasari, the 19th century art historian Walter Pater (who rediscovered Leonardo for modern audiences), and Sigmund Freud, each of whom gave rise to their own cottage industries of legend-building and hermeneutic veilings about the Tuscan polymath. Bramly wisely keeps the wiseacrings to a minimum and infuses the reader with the sense of wonder and passion this complex and daunting man must have felt towards the world around him.

Are you a fan of the Da Vinci Code movie or book? Then this book might not be your cup of tea.

Leonardo: The Artist and the Man covers the real life and era of this legendary painter, sculptor and inventor. Sorting out the life of this genius must have taken the author years to conclude, as Leonardo left thousands of manuscripts, sketches and unfinished paintings behind. Throw into the mix the fact that most paintings have been finalized by his helps and restorated throughout the centuries by incompetent painters and you've got yourself a huge mess to sort out.

Yet this book grabs the core of the man Leonardo. He was versatile, untiring, dedicated to learning and not confined to just one trade. Apart from being a great book to read, you can really learn something from it. As Leonardo always figured, everything is in relation with each other. Although jobs are far more professionalized nowadays, this is still very much true.

So if you're interested in his works or if you want to learn more about one of the legendary historic figures the 16th century had to offer, grab a copy of this book. It will not only extend your own boundaries, but is a great read as well put into a delicate perspective by the writer.