Leonardo da Vinci
An Untraceable Life
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Publisher Description
How our image of the Renaissance’s most famous artist is a modern myth
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers, many of whom have filled in the gaps of what can be known of Leonardo’s life with claims to decode secrets, reveal mysteries of a vanished past, or discover lost masterpieces of spectacular value.
In this original and provocative book, Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo’s words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. By investigating the politics and cultural tensions of the era as well as the most recent scholarship on Leonardo’s contemporaries, workshop, and writings, Campbell places Leonardo back into the milieu that shaped him and was shaped by him. He shows that it is in the gaps and contradictions of what we know of Leonardo’s life that a less familiar and far more historically significant figure appears.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
