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.)

Searching for Leonardo. In a copiously illustrated volume, art historian Campbell considers the challenges of historical scholarship through his perceptive and authoritative analysis of the life, works, and afterlife of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). With only "partial and fragile evidence" of Leonardo's life, many biographers have filled in the gaps with fictionalizations, creating a mythical persona--homosexual, vegetarian, solitary genius--who has become the central figure in what Campbell derides as "Da Vinci Worlds": "environments in which the legacy of the Florentine artist polymath is put on show for a mass public of spectators." He decries the commodification and commercialization that keeps Leonardo's ghost alive before a voracious public through "the most hopeless new attribution, the most lurid conspiracy theory, the most preposterous evaluation." Even many scholars, Campbell argues persuasively, reflect their own cultural milieu and assumptions about selfhood, agency, sexuality, and psychology rather than accounting for differences in Renaissance Europe. Campbell examines art historical and biographical interpretations surrounding many works, includingThe Last Supper, "stormy exchanges" generated by theSalvator Mundi, and the "dense thicket of myth and wishful thinking" surrounding theMona Lisa, including the identity of the sitter and her connection to Leonardo. He contests the much-repeated idea that Leonardo was "ahead of his time," which he sees as an "expression of glib superiority toward the past." Campbell's project in this book is precisely to embed Leonardo within the political, social, religious, and scientific tensions roiling European culture in the 1400s and 1500s; to construct what he calls an "anti-biography" that "seeks to make Leonardo unfamiliar"; and to ask: What does it mean to have a self, now and in the past? How can we understand "a nonmodern way of being a person"? A vigorous meditation on life-writing and one artist's reality. A vigorous meditation life-writing and one artist's reality. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.