Legend of Leonardo
Centuries ago, in an age when the world was still ruled by monarchs and dukes and countesses dressed in velvet and golden brocade, there lived a man of illegitimate birth, as warm-hearted in his disposition as he was boundless in his curiosity, fierce in his intellect and skilful with his hands. This man was engineer, architect, designer, scientist and painter – the greatest painter, say many, who had ever lived. A genius, say others, who had brought the modern world into being. His pictures were both real and ideal, more beautiful than anything ever seen before. He studied the natural world in its tiniest details, from the leaves on trees to the paws of bears, and in its hidden rules, such as the proportions of the human face and body. He looked far and peered close, sketching the pale horizons of mountains and peeling back men’s skin so he could see the muscles and arteries that lay beneath.
But this artist was also an enigma. When he died, he left riddles and tricks for those who wished to cherish his memory and preserve his legacy. Sometimes his masterpieces were painted with colours that faded or crumbled even before he had finished the work; others were sealed with varnishes that made them darker and darker with the passing of decades. Like many great men, he seemingly cared little for the gift God had given him, painting little and slowly, and instead burying himself in the notebooks that he filled with scribbles of magnificent ideas, which he had neither the patience nor the technology to build. He made fewer paintings than any other great artist in history, and even fewer have survived: at most only nineteen.
In the centuries that followed his death, people yearned to possess more of his work than they had; there were never enough pictures by this artist to satisfy the world’s craving for his images. Myths and theories proliferated about the pictures that had been lost, hidden or painted over. In the institutes of learning devoted to the arts, there was no higher calling than the study of this artist’s work; and among those scholars who studied his art, there was no greater glory than discovering a lost or forgotten painting, drawing or sculpture by his hand.
The stakes were high – and, if you fell on them, sharp. The artist never signed or dated his work. He had many pupils, whom he taught to paint as skilfully as himself, in exact imitation of his style, and they produced hundreds of copies of his works. Occasionally, a contemporary recorded, he would add the final touches himself – a fact which further confused posterity. Knowing the risks, the wisest scholars sought to resist the temptation to identify a lost painting, preferring to explore an overlooked fragment or a half-finished sentence in the artist’s notebooks. But, eventually, many succumbed to the allure of buried treasure. The corridors of art history libraries were full of the wailing ghosts of professors whose life’s work had been destroyed by the chimera of a ‘new’ Leonardo they believed they had found; the headlines, news reports and celebrations that greeted their discovery were replaced within years, if not months, by academic derision for what was now revealed to be a forgery or copy, betrayed by paint that had been applied too loosely, or colours pronounced too dominant, or in which there was a trim in the costume that belonged to an incongruous era.
This artist, Leonardo da Vinci, was just like the sun. He was the brightest planet in the art history cosmos. Scholars who flew too close to him found their books suddenly aflame and themselves engulfed in the fire of ambition. Yet still their attempts continued …
CHAPTER 1
Robert Simon had plenty of legroom on his flight to London in May 2008. He was flying first class, an unusual luxury for this comfortably successful but unostentatious Old Masters dealer, president of the invitation-only American Private Art Dealers Association. During moments of transatlantic turbulence he cast a glance down the aisle at one of the first class cabin’s cupboards, where he had been given permission to stow a slim but oversized case.
It contained a Renaissance painting, 66cm high and 45cm across, of a ‘half-figure’, to use the old-fashioned art historical term, of Christ. The portrait composition showed the face, chest and arms, with one hand raised in blessing and the other holding a transparent orb. One reason Simon was worried about the painting was because he had not been able to afford the insurance premium he had been quoted for it. He had bought it three years earlier for around $10,000 – or so he had told the media – but it was now thought to be worth between one and two hundred million dollars.
Far from being the life of luxury many people imagine, dealing in art can be a precarious existence even at the highest levels, because selling expensive paintings is, well, very expensive. Top-end galleries have vertiginous overheads. Walls have to be repainted for each show, catalogues printed, wealthy collectors wined and dined. Simon had spent tens of thousands of dollars restoring the boxed painting, and had not yet seen a penny return.
Solidly built, medium height, Jewish, fifty-something, soft-spoken, polite, Robert Simon is the kind of person who believes that modesty and understatement are rewarded by the higher forces which direct our lives. He projects a modest, pleasant, but slightly brittle calm. ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ he likes to say, repurposing a slogan emblazoned on American propaganda posters in the Second World War to the business of art.
Simon leant backwards in his seat. He was overcome by that mood men fall into when they know the die has been cast, the pieces arranged on the board, and there is nothing more they can do except perform a sequence of now predetermined actions. There could be no more organising, influencing, persuading. It was all done, to the best of his abilities. The confinement of the long pod of the aircraft cabin and the sensation of forward motion provided by the thrust of four jet engines combined into a physical metaphor for this moment in his life.
Alongside the submarine, the parachute and the machine gun, the aeroplane was the most famous invention anticipated by the artist who had consumed Simon’s life for the previous five years. Leonardo da Vinci was not the first human who had designed flying machines, and it is likely he never built one himself, but he had studied the subject for longer, written more, and drawn designs of greater sophistication than anyone before him. His ideas for human flight were based on years of watching and analysing the airborne movements of birds, bats and flying insects, and recording his observations in notes and drawings. As Simon felt air currents lifting up the plane, he recalled how Leonardo was the first to recognise that the movement of air was as important to a bird’s flight as the movement of its wings.
On 15 April 1505 Leonardo completed a draft treatise On the Flight of Birds, also known as the Turin Codex. It was only about forty pages long, filled with unusually neat lines of text, written in black ink in his trademark mirrored handwriting, right to left, interspersed with geometric diagrams, and the margins sometimes decorated with tiny, beautiful sketches of birds in flight. Leonardo’s early ornithopters, or ‘birdcraft’, had wings shaped like a bat’s, because, as he wrote, a bat’s wing has ‘a permeable membrane’ and could be more lightly constructed than ‘the wings of feathered birds’, which had to be ‘more powerful in bone and tendon’. Leonardo positioned his pilot horizontally in a frame underneath the two wings, where he was to use his arms and legs to push a system of rods and levers to make them flap. Historians say Leonardo soon came to realise that the human body was too heavy, and its muscles too weak, to provide enough power for flight, so his later designs had fixed wings and were more like gliders. He imagined launching one, appropriately, from a mountain ‘named after a great bird’, referring to Monte Ceceri, or ‘Mount Swan’, in Tuscany. Relishing the avian metaphors, Leonardo wrote that his ‘great bird will take its first flight on the back of the great swan, filling the universe with amazement, filling all writings with its renown and bringing glory to the nest in which it was born’. Nothing he designed ever flew. The contraptions were almost daft, but there was prophetic genius in his perception of the natural phenomena and laws of nature which gave rise to his machines.
Robert Simon knew that, whatever the outcome of this trip – and that really could be everything or nothing – it marked the pinnacle of his career