Still Unknown

The greatness and universality of that quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci, artist, engineer, inventor, visionary, are known to millions of people who would be hard put to remember anything he actually did— except, perhaps, paint that standby of pop culture, Mona Lisa. Some grandparents may also recall the chromolithographs of his Last Supper, which drearily adorned the walls of their Sunday school classrooms; others may recollect that he dreamed of airplanes and submarines centuries before they were invented. But even in his own lifetime, Leonardo’s name was more widely known than his achievements.

This is because these were so often flawed or fragmentary. Primarily a painter, he produced few pictures: Bernard Berenson lists a mere 18 as surviving, of which three are unfinished, and the authorship of at least one is questioned by most other critics. The Last Supper, in which he experimented with a tempera technique that proved wholly unsuited to wall painting, had become a wreck centuries before it was damaged by bombs in World War II; today, despite painstaking scientific restoration, it gives barely a hint of its original appearance. Leonardo’s most ambitious work, the Battle of Anghiari, literally slid off the walls of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio a few years after it was painted; we know it only through preparatory drawings and a few, probably inaccurate, copies, as is the case with numerous paintings highly praised by Leonardo’s contemporaries. His work as the sculptor of what would have been the largest equestrian statue ever cast in bronze is also wholly lost to us (though large bronzes are still cast according to the methods he devised), and so are his numerous engineering and architectural projects. His sole literary legacy, the Treatise on Painting, is only a compilation of various writings that a pupil put together out of manuscripts left unfinished by their author. Indeed, except for the precious paintings, all we have from Leonardo’s own hand are the notebooks and manuscripts where he recorded his ideas; there were 18 of these when he died, but today only seven are left. Thus it is hardly surprising that few nonscholars can claim more than a nodding acquaintance with Leonardo.

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Ruth Berenson

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The greatness and universality of that quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci, artist, engineer, inventor, visionary, are known to millions of people who would be hard put to remember anything he actually did— except, perhaps, paint that standby of pop culture, Mona Lisa. Some grandparents may also recall the chromolithographs of his Last Supper, which drearily adorned the walls of their Sunday school classrooms; others may recollect that he dreamed of airplanes and submarines centuries before they were invented. But even in his own lifetime, Leonardo’s name was more widely known than his achievements.

This is because these were so often flawed or fragmentary. Primarily a painter, he produced few pictures: Bernard Berenson lists a mere 18 as surviving, of which three are unfinished, and the authorship of at least one is questioned by most other critics. The Last Supper, in which he experimented with a tempera technique that proved wholly unsuited to wall painting, had become a wreck centuries before it was damaged by bombs in World War II; today, despite painstaking scientific restoration, it gives barely a hint of its original appearance. Leonardo’s most ambitious work, the Battle of Anghiari, literally slid off the walls of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio a few years after it was painted; we know it only through preparatory drawings and a few, probably inaccurate, copies, as is the case with numerous paintings highly praised by Leonardo’s contemporaries. His work as the sculptor of what would have been the largest equestrian statue ever cast in bronze is also wholly lost to us (though large bronzes are still cast according to the methods he devised), and so are his numerous engineering and architectural projects. His sole literary legacy, the Treatise on Painting, is only a compilation of various writings that a pupil put together out of manuscripts left unfinished by their author. Indeed, except for the precious paintings, all we have from Leonardo’s own hand are the notebooks and manuscripts where he recorded his ideas; there were 18 of these when he died, but today only seven are left. Thus it is hardly surprising that few nonscholars can claim more than a nodding acquaintance with Leonardo.