Gopnik: Renaissance Man

In Adam Gopnik's article for the New Yorker Magazine, Leonardo, from Vinci, is seen as otherworldly yet a man of his time.  It is doubtless that Leonardo was an odd duck but, is this just a result of pure genius?  "Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it."  (Gopnik)  Leonardo had an insatiable curiosity for everything.  It seems ironic that he had a disdain for being called a "painter".  He put wings on pet lizards, scribbled a parachute which proved to work perfectly, designed buildings, and imagined things that were yet-to-be invented.

There are two new books about Leonardo that try and make this genius Renaissance man more tangible.  "Leonardo" by Martin Kemp and "Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind" by Charles Nicholl come at this biography in different ways.  Kemp's book is less of a biography and more of "a series of intense, learned meditations on Leonardesque themes."  (Gopnik)  The book states that, in his search for true proportion, Leonardo approached it visually and not mathematically.  He had the ability of seeing abstract form.

Nicholl's book is more of a true historical biography.  I personally read the chapter about Leonardo's studio and came away from it with a vivid image of what his life was like.  He quotes letters and documents.  He details the realities of Leonardo's birth and sexual orientation, and it's impact at the time.  Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine sculptor, quotes the King of France as saying that Leonardo was "the most interesting man he had ever spoken to."  (Gopnik)

Everyone watched Leonardo.  A monk in Milan made notes as Leonardo painted the Last Supper.  It was noted that he would sometimes show up, stare at his painting, and they leave.  In the book, Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown alludes to Jesus having fathered children and being the secret "re-founder of the old religion of the Goddess through the veneration of Mary Magdalene".  Could St. John in the Last Supper actually be Mary Magdalene in disguise?

In dealing with Leonardo, we know that he was someone unique.  "His life's work was to turn his contemporaries' idea of the artist from artisan to genius, from working stiff to saint and shaman and magician and necromancer -- and, for that matter, rich man's ornament."  I, personally, am going to put Nicholl's book on my "must read" list.