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Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance man

There is almost no field of knowledge to which he did not make a contribution. Yet, 500 years on, we are still struggling to understand the genius behind the 'Mona Lisa'

Sunday 20 April 2003 00:00 BST
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For five centuries people have tried to crack the mystery of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Even Sigmund Freud had a go, trying to decipher the enigma of her smile. Amateur psychologists crowd in front of the rather humble little picture in the Louvre Gallery, wanting just a glimpse of what is the most famous painting in the world. Today Alan Yentob, television's very own Renaissance man, starts Leonardo, a three-part, prime-time series on BBC1 to mark the 500th anniversary of the picture's completion.

But what is the real meaning of the Mona Lisa? Was she smugly pregnant? Was she even more smugly pregnant by someone other than her aged husband? Was the unusually direct gaze and faint flicker of the corners of the mouth a secret between Lisa da Giacondo, Madonna Lisa, and the painter who was actually the real father of her child? Or was she really a he, Leonardo's pupil and lover, Andrea Salai? They have all been put forward as serious theories, and that smile could say any one of those things.

Or none. Leonardo is the only person in the history of painting who has been able to make a smile like that, an artist with not only an unmatched visual talent but an extraordinary ability to switch from science to painting to architecture and back again with the utmost ease.

It led the early art historian Giorgio Vasari to ascribe god-like "celestial" powers to him, and five centuries later that judgement hasn't changed. According to Professor Martin Kemp, Oxford's Leonardo expert: "His vision of the totality of the world as a kind of single organism does speak to us with particular relevance today, now that our technological potential has become so awesome."

It seems that this illegitimate son of a lawyer from the Tuscan village of Vinci was always destined for greatness, and though he was volatile and wouldn't stick to his lessons he could grasp complex principles of mathematics and music so quickly that he baffled his teachers. When he was 17 he was apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence who became so depressed at his pupil's transcendent facility with pigment that he gave up colour painting for ever.

By the time he was 20 Leonardo was famous and on the road to superstardom. At 30 he moved to Milan to start 15 years in the service of Duke Ludovico Sforza. Later he was architect, engineer and map-maker to Cesare Borgia, and at the end of his life he was working for Francis I of France, in whose arms he reportedly died, aged 67, in 1519. He had left Italy after a spectacular row with Michelangelo, whom he considered an arrogant practitioner of limited scope.

Thanks to Vasari and his Lives of the Artists, written 30 years after Leonardo's death, we know quite a lot about him, but not what he looked like. The image we all have and assume to be a self-portrait is the red chalk drawing of the old man with nicely combed beard and firmly set jaw, steadfastly gazing into the distance over the viewer's right shoulder. It fits very nicely with notions of a sage master of his arts, a kind of mixture of Gandalf, Moses and Aristotle.

But it isn't Leonardo at all. It's certainly by him, but it was drawn in about 1495 when he was a gadabout of a mere 43 in Milan. That it is a self-portrait is just a 19th-century supposition. Beards were profoundly unfashionable among the smart set surrounding Ludovico Sforza, and Leonardo didn't grow his for probably another 15 years. The best idea of him comes from a 1515 profile by his student Francesco Melzi, which you can see in the Queen's Gallery exhibition of the treasury of Leonardos in the Royal Collection, opening on 9 May.

In the same collection you can see what might be Leonardo's own image of himself a year or so before he died. In black chalk on a rather scruffy bit of paper, he's drawn the profile of not so much Gandalf as Fagin, a peg-toothed old codger with straggly beard, bald pate, eyebrows so overgrown you can barely make out his eyes, and a nose he seems to have redrawn several times in order to make it more grotesquely bulbous.

But we don't know the Leonardo whom Vasari describes as having "outstanding physical beauty", whose "magnificent presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul", the gifted musician who made his own lyres and "the most talented improviser in verse of his time".

And he was, of course, a polymath. As Sir Ernst Gombrich wrote at the time of the Hayward Gallery's 1989 exhibition: "There appeared no field of knowledge to which he had not made a contribution: anatomy, physiology, mechanics, hydraulics, botany and optics were all transformed by his magic touch. No wonder he was hailed as a genius who had transcended all the limitations to which human nature is prone."

But he was a pretty cavalier polymath, hardly ever finishing anything. Duke Ludovico commissioned a full-size equestrian statue of himself which Leonardo set about preparing hundreds of drawings for, dissecting dead horses to get the musculature and bone structure right, experimenting with bronze alloys to get the best finish. But by the time the duke was deposed 23 years later all Leonardo had completed was a small clay model.

Tragically few paintings of his have survived. His true masterpiece is probably the extraordinary Last Supper fresco painted for the refectory of the church of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. Leonardo used to pop in every now and then to add some more over a period of about four years, much to the annoyance of the prior. He eventually complained to the duke, who summoned Leonardo to explain himself. The problem he said, was the last figure. He couldn't find a model evil-looking enough for the figure of Judas, and his patron would just have to be patient. If he was in a hurry, though, he could always stick in a portrait of the prior who might do rather well.

In fact, Leonardo agonised over the figures for this piece, not only the portraits but their gestures and activities, and he wrote copious notes on how they might be interacting with each other and which particular moment during the supper he was capturing in paint.

Everything interested Leonardo, but it was facial expression that fascinated him above all, especially the grotesque. Vasari has him making a real nuisance of himself, seeing a face he found interesting and follow- ing its owner around all day, sometimes for several days, making sketches from every conceivable angle.

But beauty is what Leonardo was in demand for, then and now. The Mona Lisa is famous because Vasari described Leonardo making it – "He employed singers and musicians or jesters to keep her full of merriment" – and because it was owned by Francis I, who put it on public display. But enigmatic smiles were a speciality of his, strangely creaseless smiles which seem not to alter the shape of the face at all. The prettiest is probably St Anne in a drawing for The Madonna and Child with the Infant John the Baptist and St Anne, the sexiest in Leda and the Swan, the most lewd in St John the Baptist.

He can make this enigmatic smile because of his detailed knowledge of facial structure, acquired through countless and often illegal dissections of human cadavers, as well as his supreme skill with pigment and shading, which he spent all his life practising. I've given Mona Lisa that smile because I can, Leonardo seems to be saying.

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